This project will investigate the relationship between the Big 5 personality traits and social media usage of individuals in the ALSPAC cohort. The Five Factor Model of personality has been used extensively in psychology to predict attitudes and behaviour. The Big-Five personality traits act on a spectrum and consist of the following: Openness to Experience (characterised by one’s willingness to try new things as well as engage in imaginative and intellectual activities); Conscientiousness (associated with organisation, thoughtfulness and impulse control); Extroversion (characterised by the tendency and intensity to which someone seeks engagement with their environment); Agreeableness (concerned with how people tend to treat relationships with others) and Neuroticism: (associated with one’s overall emotional stability). With the recent rise in people using social media, there is growing interest in the association between personality and social media use. So far, this association has only been explored in US, Asian and Australian populations, with less focus on this association in a UK population. Further, past meta-analyses of the association between personality and social media use have arrived at different conclusions about which traits are associated with social media use and the effect size of these associations. This is likely due to varying definitions of social media use.
Current research has primarily focused on single platform use, but as the majority of people using social media use more than one platform, there is the need to investigate the relationship with multi-platform use. Most studies examining the relationship between social media use and the Big Five personality traits have measured social media usage by using the most popular site, Facebook and a few studies have focused on general use of platforms. Understanding the link between personality and social media use is important because Neuroticism is associated with anxiety and depression, therefore it may be a confounding variable that future studies should take into account when exploring the association between multiple social media usage and anxiety/depression. There is also evidence of a link between multiple platform use and mental health difficulties, so it is important to understand the link between personality and social media use within the context of more than one social media platform. Taking this into consideration, this study aims to elucidate the associations between personality and social media use by concentrating on just a single definition of social media use (frequency of visits to a social media site) and examining this by focusing on one specific platform as well as multi-platform use of social media.
Exploratory analyses will also be run to examine potential moderators of the association between personality and social media use, such as gender and ethnicity, to help further explain the relationship.