Intensity of Facebook use: a personality-based perspective on dependency formation

ABSTRACT

Despite recent privacy scandals, the intensity with which individuals use Facebook has not declined. This indicates that individuals still place significant value on the psychosocial development afforded by using Facebook. As such, the objective of this study was to develop a research model to evaluate the influence of specific individual differences (gender and personality traits) on the intensity of Facebook use. Data was collected from 576 United States Facebook users and subsequently analysed using partial least squares (PLS) path modelling including multi-group analysis. Results indicate the existence of a significant positive relationship between the intensity of Facebook use and extraversion as well as agreeableness. The results further indicate that males high in extraversion use Facebook more intensively than females making them particularly vulnerable to the development of a Facebook dependency.

KEYWORDS:

• Personality traits
• Facebook dependency
• Facebook addiction
• path modelling
• interaction analysis
• PLS-MGA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).