Engagement with Social Network Sites: Exploring the Role of Personality Traits

Objectives: Adolescent in the digital era actively engages with wide range of social networking apps, which have become an integral part of their daily lives alongside their educational pursuits. It seems that the use of social networking has reached a new height during post covid situation across the world. Dependence on social networking has risen during this period. Therefore, present study designed to gauge connection of personality traits with excess use of Social Network Sites among secondary school students. Method: A sample of 120 students was included for the study using the purposive sampling method. Big Five Inventory (BFI), developed by John, O. P., Donahue, E. M., & Kentle, R. L. (1991), this scale was employed to explain the personality traits; the Social Networking Addiction Scale (SNAS) developed by Ghazi Shahnawaz and Usama Rehman (2005) was used to measure engagement of students on Social Networking sites.  A correlation design was applied to explore the objective of the current study. Results: Overall, the finding indicate that two traits of big five traits – openness to experience and agreeableness, emerged as significant personality traits associated with adolescent engagement with social network sites. Openness to experience showed significant positive relation while agreeableness demonstrated a negative relation between with social media addiction.  Conclusion: This study contributes to the growing body of literature on social network addiction and its relation to personality traits among secondary school students. By identifying the specific personality traits associated with social network addiction, this research provides valuable insights for developing targeted prevention and intervention strategies to promote healthier online behaviors and improve the overall well-being of adolescents in the digital age.