Relationships among personality traits, facebook usages, and leisure activities: A Turkish population case

Social network sites attract billions of users. Today, Facebook is one of the most popular social networks with 1.39 billion active users worldwide. In this research, we will examine possible relationships among personality traits, Facebook usages, and leisure activities of Turkish population. In addition, we divided population to three -undergraduate, graduate and non-graduate - to research the effect of student statuses towards Facebook usage. Four hypotheses of the research are; users with different personality traits may have different Facebook usages, users with different personality traits may have different leisure activities, users with different Facebook usages may have different leisure activities and users with different student status may have different Facebook usages. We developed a questionnaire that has four parts (demographic data, Facebook usage intensity scale, personality traits, and leisure activities) with 33 items, based on the Kuo and Tang's (2004) research ad shared on the internet. The data collect data from 556 Turkish people. 552 participants' data were valid and 189 people from the participants are undergraduates, 189 people are graduate and doctoral students while 174 people are not students. The data analyzed by using statistics methods such as descriptive statistics, independent t tests and ANOVA. In addition, for comparing pairwise means we applied post-hoc tests. Tukey's honestly significant difference (HSD) method applied for means with equal variances. For the mean with unequal variances, Games Howell method approached. To research the effect of personality traits towards Facebook usage, independent t test approached. The results showed that, people with high extraversion personality trait had longer Facebook experience. They accept Facebook as a part of their daily activities and had more number of friends and photos than low extraversion people. High agreeableness people had more number of photos than high agreeableness people. There are no significant difference between high and low agreeableness people in other Facebook attitudes. Low conscientiousness people had longer daily and weekly time use than high conscientiousness people. One possible explanation is that people with high level of conscientiousness consider Facebook a waste of time. Low emotional stability people spent more time daily and weekly on Facebook than people did with high emotional stability people did. There were no significant difference between high emotional stability people and low emotional stability people in other Facebook attitudes (i.e. Facebook is part of my daily activities, I am proud of telling others I am on Facebook, I feel lost if I have not used Facebook for a while, and I feel I am part of the Facebook community) and in Facebook experience, the number of groups and the number of friends. High openness people had more Facebook friends than low openness people. There were no significant difference between people high and low openness people in other Facebook attitudes (i.e. Facebook is part of my daily activities, I am proud of telling others I am on Facebook, I feel lost if I have not used Facebook for a while, and I feel I am part of the Facebook community) and in Facebook experience, the number of groups, daily time use and weekly time use. Independent t test results between personality and leisure activities showed that high extraversion people were significant different from low extraversion people in fitness and outdoor activities. High extraversion people spent more time on these activities than low extraversion people did. However, there were no significant difference in team sports, recreation, intellectual and artistic activities. There were no significant difference between high and low openness in all leisure time activities except fitness and artistic activities. High openness people spent more time on fitness and artistic activities than low openness people did. Different levels of conscientiousness personality trait had no effect on leisure time activities. People with high level of emotional stability spent more time on team sports and fitness activities than low emotional stability people, however there were no significant differences between high and low emotional stability people in outdoor, recreation, intellectual, and artistic leisure activities, High openness people spent more time on fitness, outdoor, intellectual and artistic activities than low openness people. When we examined the result from leisure time activities perspective. For recreation activities, nonetheless from personality traits everyone joins to these activities. For team sports, only people with high emotional stability people spent more time than low emotional stability people did. For fitness activities, people with high emotional stability, agreeableness, emotional stability and openness spent more time than low emotional stability, agreeableness, emotional stability and openness people; but people with conscientiousness trait. For outdoor activities, high extraversion and openness people spent more time than low extraversion and openness people; but people in agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness were indifferent. For intellectual activities, only high openness people spent more than low openness people; there is no difference for other personality traits. For artistic activities people with high agreeableness and openness personality traits spent more time than people with low agreeableness and openness; however there are no differences for extraversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness personality traits. Hypothesis 3, which claims Facebook usages have effect on leisure activities tested by using ANOVA. ANOVA results showed that recreation activities participation significantly influenced by the number of photographs on Facebook; however not by Facebook experience, the number of friends, daily time use, weekly time use and the number of groups. The number of photos and the number of groups significantly influenced participation to the artistic activities; however, it doesn't influenced by daily time use, weekly time use, Facebook experience and the number of friends. Post-hoc test results showed that people with more number of photos (301-400 > more than 50) would spend more time on recreation activities. People with more number of photos (more than 400 > 50-100 > less than 50) would spend more time on artistic activities. Finally people with more number of groups (more than 60 > less than 5) would spend more time on artistic activities. Finally, hypothesis 4, possible influences of student status' on Facebook usages tested by using ANOVA. According to results non-student people spent more daily and weekly time on Facebook than graduate people. In addition, undergraduate people have more friends than graduate people. Undergraduate students were joined more groups than people who are graduate and non-student. The hypotheses results showed probable relationships between personality traits, Facebook usages, and leisure activities. Low extraversion people who has 301-400 number of photos on Facebook 301-400 would spend more time on recreation activities than high extraversion people would. High conscientiousness and high extraversion people with people with photos more than 400 and groups more than 60 would spend more time on artistic activities. Low emotional stability people with photos more than 400 and groups more than 60 would spend more time on artistic activities than high emotional stability people would. Low emotional stability people with 301-400 photos on Facebook would spend more time on recreation activities than high emotional stability people would.