The Relationship between Personality Trait and Social Media Addiction

Background: Many empirical studies indicated that social media use has increased substantially from time to time and it becomes an important element of human life. However, social media can become problematic if its use is excessive. Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the level of social media addiction, and examine the relationship between social media addiction and personality traits. Methods: The study administered standardized and non-standardized questionnaires to 170 employees of Ethiopian Information Network Security Agency. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Results: The findings of the study revealed that the majority of the participants spent 1-2 hours on social media per a day, and they used social media sites (mainly Face book, using phones as a device) for communication purpose. Social media addiction is found to be related to sex and time spent on social media, but not to age. Personality is another variable related to social media addiction explaining as much as one-fifth of it. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that 27.2% of the variance in social media addiction is explained by both sex and personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, & neuroticism). Conclusion: This study claimed that personality traits and sex play a vital role in determining the level of social media use. Addictive use of social media was related to being a woman, having Openness and Neurotic personality traits and lower Agreeableness. This study provides an empirical contribution to knowledge about the effect of personality traits and individual differences on social media addiction.