Speakers - 2026

Title: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Social Media Addiction

Abstract

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 is to assess the level of social media addiction across different demographic variables, 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 more importantly independent sample T-Test, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson product moment correlation, and multiple regressions were used. The reliability of instruments was tested for both final and pilot study and their Cronbach’s alpha value was good. The data was analyzed using STATA.

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. The result of t-test indicated that there was statistically significant sex difference on social media addiction, agreeableness and neuroticism. On the other hand there was no significant sex difference on openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. The result of ANOVA indicated that there was no significant age difference on social media addiction, and five personality traits. But social media addiction had a significant difference across employees time spent on social media groups. Findings of Pearson’s Product-Moment correlations showed that there was significant correlation between social media addiction with openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, but not significant with extraversion. The Pearson coefficient indicated that a weak negative correlation with conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness; a weak positive with openness; and a moderate positive correlation with neuroticism. The result of hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that 27.6% of variances in social media addiction were explained by personality traits and demographic variables. 20.6 % of variances in social media addiction were explained by personality traits. Openness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism and sex were found to be significant predictors of social media addiction.   

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.

The findings were discussed in line with previous research findings. Finally, based on the findings of the study summery, conclusion and recommendations were made and drawn.