Motives of Adolescents to Use the Internet as a Function of Personality Traits, Personal and Social Factors

Abstract

This study investigates the relation between personality traits (Five-Factor-Model), personal (innovativeness, self-efficacy) and social (expectations or relevant reference groups) Internet related factors on the one hand and three motives (information, entertainment and, interpersonal communication) for going on-line among 122 adolescent Internet users on the other hand. The specificity hypothesis was supported in that Internet-specific personal and social factors together accounted for more variance of the 1nternet use motives than the global personality traits. With regard to the personality traits, neuroticism was found to be positively associated with the entertainment motive and with the interpersonal communication motive and extraversion was positively associated with the communication motive only. The potential of the three Internet motives to predict corresponding types of Internet activities was demonstrated. numbers were reported in Germany by Doll, Petersen, and Rudolf, with 7I percent Internet users for college students and 67 percent for high school students [6].Strongly divergent positions exist about the quality of Internet effects on daily life in general. Internet opponents emphasize that Internet use might cause people to become addicted to certain ways of Internet use [e.g, 7], to become isolated and cut off from genuine social relationships because of the communication with anonymous strangers [e.g., 8]. Internet supporters emphasize the educational usefulness of the Internet and argue that Internet use leads to more and better social relationships on the basis of common interests and by freeing people from the constraints of geography or isolation [9, l0].Because very different Internet-related activities can be employed by its users, the effects of Internet use on individuals, groups, and society should depend on their predominating Internet using types. Beside other possibilities, the Internet can be used for one-to-one or group communication, to research and gather information, for gaming and recreational purposes, and in order to produce and publish content in hypertext format. Interpersonal communication was found to be the dominant type of Internet use at home [11]. But social interactions via the Internet are different from traditional face-to-face interactions and do not have effects comparable to traditional social activities [12]. The emotional quality of relationships determines whether the social use of the Internet has positive or negative effects [7]. Close relationships with people via the Internet are associated with frequent contact, deeper feelings, and a broad interest domain and thus have been found to lead to better social and psychological outcomes such as more social support [13,14]. These relationships can serve as a buffer from lifes stresses, whereas weak Internet relationships characterized by superficial, infrequent contacts and easily broken bonds are useful only to receive information and contact social resources unavailable in people's actual environment.In a l...

El modelo de los cinco grandes factores de personalidad y el uso problemático de Internet en jóvenes colombianos

“…En cuanto a la relación entre el uso de Internet y la personalidad, nuestros resultados constatan, que el neuroticismo predice el uso problemático de Internet (Hamburger et al, 2000;Hardie et al, 2007;Viñas, 2009;Wolfradt et al, 2001). Los aspectos teóricos de la dimensión neuroticismo resal-tan el carácter descriptivo de los problemas psicológicos; las personas con puntuaciones altas en este factor tienden a experimentar emociones negativas (John et al, 1999).…”

“…Algunos de los estudios reportan una relación positiva con las dimensiones de neuroticismo (Hamburger y Ben-Artzi, 2000;Hardie y Tee, 2007;Tsai et al, 2009;Wolfradt y Doll, 2001) y extraversión (Hamburger et al, 2000). Otros muestran relación negativa con neuroticismo y positiva con apertura y afabilidad (Luo y Ding, 2006).…”

Personality and Internet usage: A large-scale representative study of young adults

“…For example, online communication such as text chat lacks rich social cues and those scoring high in Neuroticism, characterized by anxiety, may be uncomfortable without such cues (cf Amiel & Sargent, 2004). On the other hand, leisure activities such as listening to music or watching movies can be relaxing which could be attractive activities for those high in Neuroticism (Swickert, Hittner, Harris, & Herring, 2002;Wolfradt & Doll, 2001). Thus, to gain a nuanced understanding of personality and online behavior we include a focus on categories of Internet use.…”

“…Evidence though has not fully supported this: Extraversion was shown to positively correlate with using the Internet to maintain both remote and face-toface friendships (Tosun & Lajunen, 2010) and was positively related to information exchange, which included email (Swickert et al, 2002). With adolescents, Extraversion was correlated with Internet communication (Wolfradt & Doll, 2001). In contrast, Extroversion was found to be negatively correlated with feeling comfortable communicating online (Amiel & Sargent, 2004) and with using online chat (Anolli et al, 2005), also in contrast to the claim of Amichai-Hamburger et al (2002).…”

Explaining the Number of Social Media Fans for North American and European Professional Sports Clubs with Determinants of Their Financial Value

“…Hambrick et al (2010) and Pegoraro (2010) examined athletes' use of Twitter. The two studies each relied on six categories derived from previous research (Clavio 2008;Funk et al 2002;Seo and Green 2008;Wolfradt and Doll 2001): interactivity (responding to fans), diversion (relating to personal life and pop culture or landmark reference), information sharing (relating to business life excluding promoting products), content (links to pictures, videos and Web sites), fanship (other sport or athlete reference), and promotional (promoting products). The two articles found that athletes mainly interact with fans and talk about their private life.…”