Abstract
This Final Year Project will discuss the relationship between Facebook usage and the three variables of personality, self-esteem and addictive tendencies. The aim of this study is to see if certain personalities and levels of self-esteem lead to higher levels of Facebook use. And also to see if Facebook usage has addictive characteristics. This study is being undertaken as it is a neglected topic, the internet and social-networking is a growing virtual world that attracts millions of people, therefore it is important to understand who is more inclined to be on these sites and why. The research method is a quantitative approach, by using a questionnaire to achieve a large sample of responses with factual answers. 188 participants were used, 109 females and 79 males. The analysis revealed that women are more prone to have addictive tendencies towards Facebook. Results indicated a correlation between self-esteem and Facebook use however findings were not significant. Extrovert personalities showed to be most prevalent on Facebook. Facebook has a huge impact on peoples lives as some people go on it to heighten their self-esteem levels, others go onto to feed their personalities, and also people have addictive tendencies towards it now with logging in constantly. Future research needs to be done, with Facebook having such a large audience, there is privacy issues as people display a lot more on their profile than they think. Author keywords: Facebook, social networking, personalities, self-esteem, addictive tendencies
