Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Investigating personality differences between female and male college studenthrough Facebook

Abstract
          Previous studies have shown that many differences exist between female and male Facebook users among college students. These differences can be used to explore the personality differences between females and males. Totally 167 surveys about social media were taken in Texas Tech University between October 12, 2014 and October 23, 2014. Based on the results of all the surveys, we analyzed the personality differences between females and males in two aspects: neuroticism and extraversion. Through analyzing the time spent on Facebook and frequency of checking Facebook, we found males were more neurotic than females. By investigating the participants’ activities on Facebook, we figured out that males were more extraverted than females. From these two conclusions, we can also deduce that people who have a strong sense of loneliness may not always lack social activities. 
Introduction
Social media, as internet-based applications, were created for social interactions. Through social networks people can establish or keep connections, share information, and express feelings with friends. Emergence of tablet computers and smart phones has led to more wide and frequent usage of social media in modern society. Social media have become an indispensable part of our modern life, especially for young people. Facebook is considered as one of the most popular social media among college students in the United States (U.S.). Approximately 94% of undergraduate students were reported to have Facebook accounts with a 150-200 friends list (Ellison et al., 2007). Stern and Taylor (2007) stated 96% out of 364 college students spend 10 to 60 minutes every day on Facebook. Consequently, Facebook provides a huge amount of information for social media research.
Literature review
Many studies have proved that men and women are more different than alike in personality characteristics (Rettner, 2012; Costa Jr et al., 2001; Collins, 2012; Del Giudice et al., 2012). Collins (2012) found females were more sensitivity, warmth, and apprehension than males through analyzing a survey of 10,000 people. Rettner (2012) utilized 15 personality scales, such as warmth, sensitivity, and perfectionism, to test personality differences between men and women. The results showed very large differences between sexes. Previous studies have also indicated that social media could be used as an effective tool to investigate personality differences between young female and male users (Orchard et al., 2014; Amichai-Hamburger, 2002; Amichai-Hamburger et al., 2010; Correa et al, 2010). Facebook, as one of the most popular social media, is widely used to explore personality differences (Ross et al., 2009; Ellison et al., 2007). Personality differences can be reflected from the number of Facebook friends, Facebook profile design, the time spent on Facebook, frequency of posting pictures and sharing links, and ways of expressing feelings. As we mentioned above, personality is identified from many aspects, such as warmth, sensitivity, perfectionism, apprehension. In general, the most universally accepted model to describe personality features was created by McCrae in 1992. McCrae (1992) invented a Five-Factor Model (FFM) to describe personality in five aspects: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Neuroticism is a reflection of people’s distress and sensitivity extents. Butt and Phillips (2008) and Wolfradt and Doll (2001) indicated people at high level of neuroticism spent more time on internet communication to alleviate loneliness. In this case, neuroticism difference between males and females can be detected by the frequency of checking Facebook and the time spent on Facebook. Extraversion is a reflection of people’s sociable ability (Ross et al., 2009). Consequently, the number of friends on Facebook accounts and the amount of sharing personal information, such as posting personal, family, or friends’ photos, are indexes to measure the extraversion level. In this study, a survey of 160 participants in Texas Tech University will be taken to explore their basic Facebook account information and activities on Facebook. Based on these data, I will focus on analyzing two aspects of personality differences (neuroticism and extraversion) between male and female college students.
Research question
What personality differences can be detected by comparing males and females’ activities on Facebook?
Hypothesis
Females are at a relatively higher level of neuroticism and extraversion than males by analyzing their activities on Facebook.
Data and Methods
To collect data about social media, 167 surveys were taken in Texas Tech University between October 12, 2014 and October 23, 2014. Texas Tech University is a public research university located in Lubbock, Texas. It is the sixth largest university in Texas, and is the largest institution of higher education in west Texas. The current enrollment is about 33,111, including approximately 93% of Americans and 7% of international students. Most of the students come from Texas (85.17%) and some are from New Mexico, California, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas. During the past 85 years, the university has granted 173,551 bachelor degrees, 34,541 master degrees, 5,906 doctoral degrees, and 7,092 law degrees (Student Wellness Center, 2014).
The questions of this survey were created by Thomas Leverett, who teaches Advanced Writing for International Students (ESL 5301 in fall, 2014). The survey had two versions: online (Google Forms) version and paper version (one sheet and double sides). The online version was made by Shabboo Valipoor in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thomas Leverett, two teaching assistants, and seven students in this class were in charge of sending out these surveys. Each person was required to find at least ten Texas Tech undergraduate or graduate students from the United States (U.S.) including five females and five males. If some participants filled out the survey but they were found to be not students or they were international students, their surveys should be put in another pile. Additionally, everyone needed to ask five more people to complete the surveys. These five persons could be students, faculty members, friends, close friends, or surveyors themselves. When they took the surveys, surveyors should not give any advice or suggestions to fill them out. For example, it generally does not say whether to check one or check multiple answers. All the answers depend on the participants themselves. If someone left something blank surveyors should not put any pressure on them, unless they forgot to fill out the back, in which case they could get a gentle reminder. If someone was angry about taking the survey or didn’t feel comfortable about the questions, surveyors should apologize and back down. If someone would like to share something about the survey questions, surveyors should listen carefully, patiently, and keep track. If someone was curious about the reason for doing the survey surveyors should explain it in detail. One important thing is that all participants should be told the results would be uploaded online anonymously and not have statistical significance.
Most of the participants were very glad to take these questionnaires and felt interested. Some interesting stories happened when taking these surveys. Thamas Leverett said one woman said, “Facebook is the devil” and felt she was forced to tweet in a literary criticism class. Feixiong said his friends shared a personal story with him. His friend met a girl through a social media website. After communicating with each other they established a relationship and finally got married. From this story we cannot deny the power of social media. Some students talked much about the feelings when they took ice bucket challenge. Ying said that a boy described how he would rather have for all diseases and autoimmune disorder and another boy said he had killed a few when he dumped a bucket of ice water onto his head. A student from Shabboo Valipoor’s department even hated the ice bucket challenge. Some participants said they only texted at stop signs while driving, so there might be one more answer to question 2. Additionally, a few students said they did not care about the “real name” policy of Facebook, so they wrote comments like “neutral” for question 7.
Totally 167 survey questionnaires were returned, including 152 paper versions and 15 online versions. As we counted these surveys we figured out two major issues. Fifteen participants failed to check whether they were undergraduate students, graduate students, or other occupations, or where they were from, international or not. In this case, these 15 surveys were excluded. Thus, we obtained 152 surveys in total as original data for our social media study.
Results
Ten surveyors were in charge of collecting our questionnaires. They were T. Leverett, who created the survey, M. Gries, R. Branch, Y. Liu, F. Luo, K. Aric, S. Kaleli, C. Rios-Blanco, who also organized the results of the survey, F. Almutlaq, and S. Valipoor, who made the online version of the survey. Totally 167 questionnaires were returned, and 15 were excluded due to lack of certain information. After summarizing, 80 females and 72 males participated in this survey. The numbers of females and males maintained a balance, which was reasonable for our research on the differences between females and males in using social media. To keep a balance in age, 59 graduate students (older than 24 years old) and 85 undergraduate students (younger than 24 years old) were included. There were also 8 participants who were teaching assistants, faculty members, friends, or close friends with the surveyors. Six of the surveyors were international students, which provided a good opportunity to take surveys among international students. In total, 32 international students who came from at least four foreign countries were involved in the survey. Figure 1 shows the general information about the participants’ gender, educational level, and citizenship (American or international).
The usages of the top nine types of social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Ello, Vine, and Google+) were investigated in this survey (Figure 2).
Figure 2 indicates that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the most popular social media. Before the survey was taken it was assumed that Facebook was becoming less popular than Twitter. Unexpectedly, the results show Facebook owns more users than Twitter. Figure 2 shows 93.4% and 66.4% of the participants had Facebook and Twitter accounts respectively. Moreover, people posted information on Facebook more frequently than they did on Twitter. The percentage of people who posted information occasionally and regularly on Facebook was 13.15% higher than that on Twitter.  Although people did not post information on YouTube as frequently as they did on Facebook and Twitter, 81.6% of the participants had YouTube accounts. In contrast, few people knew about Pinterest, Ello, and Vine.
Females and males have different attitudes towards social media. In this survey, we investigated whether females and males had different opinions on social media’s impact on their friendships (Figure 3). Most people thought social media had no good or bad influence on their friendships. However, males had more positive attitudes than females. Approximately 34.72% of males indicated social media totally benefitted their friendships overall, which was 14.72% more than females. Almost the same proportions of females and males thought social media affected their friendships badly.
Since relationship status is relatively private, some people do not like to publish news about their relationships on their social media accounts. Females and males also report differently on publishing relationships. Figure 4 implies that males are more likely to share their relationship status with others. Moreover, a higher percentage of females (11.25%) publish their relationships only under pressure, which is about 7% higher than that of males.
Figure 5 displays the general information of female and male participants on Facebook, such as whether they have Facebook accounts, the frequency of posting. The results indicate more females than males said they had Facebook accounts. However, a higher percentage of males than females said they posted information regularly.
Table 1 below shows differences between females and males on the time spent on Facebook, frequency of checking Facebook, and the usage change on Facebook. A majority of females (61.25%) said they spent less than half an hour on Facebook every day. About 76.06% of males reported that it cost them less than an hour on Facebook every day. Among these male participants half of them said they spent less than 30 minutes on Facebook per day and the other half of them played with Facebook between 30 and 60 minutes per day. The percentage of female Facebook users who stated that they spent more than an hour on Facebook is 5.19% lower than that of male Facebook users. It is approximately 19.71% of males said they spent about 60 to 90 minutes on Facebook every day, which is 7.20% higher than female Facebook users. Yet, female Facebook users who extremely like hanging out on Facebook are more than male Facebook users. The result shows the difference of the frequency of checking Facebook accounts between male and females users is almost similar with the result of time spent on Facebook. A majority of females check their Facebook accounts less than three times per day. Most males check their Facebook accounts between four times and seven times every day. The percentages of females who said they checked their Facebook account between four and seven times a day and between eight times and twelve times a day are 18.19% and 1.39% lower than those of males respectively. While the percentage of females who said they checked Facebook account more than twelve time is a little bit higher than that of males. Table 1 also shows that fewer and fewer people use Facebook. Approximately half of the participants said they used Facebook less than before.
Although females said they checked their Facebook relatively less than males, they love to check their social media before going to bed. Figure 6 shows that 60% of females often use social media before sleeping while only 5.63% males do the same thing. A majority of males rarely check their social media before sleeping.
Female and male users have great differences on their Facebook activities. Table 2 displays the percentages of females and males’ seven main activities on Facebook. Apparently, males like posting pictures, sharing feelings, and messaging with old friends on Facebook better than females. Neither females nor males like using apps or hashtags on Facebook.
Also when people visit their Facebook account, females and males are concerned with different contents. Table 3 indicates that males have more interaction with their family and are more interested in politics.
Discussion
The usages of the top nine social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Ello, Vine, and Google+) were investigated in this survey. Approximately 93.4% and 66.4% of the participants use Facebook and Twitter respectively (Figure 2). Facebook and Twitter are the most two most popular social media among college students, which is the same as our expectations. Many research studies have proved that young people spend more time on smartphones than traditional computers (Halleck, 2014). Consequently, it was assumed that the usage of Twitter was increasing and Facebook was decreasing. However, figure 2 indicates Facebook is still more popular than Twitter, which was unexpected. There are some possible reasons. For example, the instant messaging feature of Facebook was allowed users to chat with certain friends instantly and conveniently. Although Twitter can be used to chat, every tweet is limited to within 140 characters, which is not as user-friendly as Facebook. Additionally, Facebook has more entertainment apps, which helps people to kill time.
Figure 2 also shows an interesting thing, that although Google+ has the second largest number of registered users, the users seldom post through Google+. The large number of registered users could be due to Google’ E-mail (Gmail), which is the most popular E-mail in the United States and even in the world (Rosenfeld, 2014). In most cases, when people register for Gmail they automatically have Google+ accounts. Yet, the complexity of posting photos and information on Google+ may frustrate its users. Before posting users need to find connections to add to circles, add suggestions and friends to circles, and then post to specific people by choosing certain circles.
Ello and Vine are much less popular among all the social media. The major reason may be that they are newly developed. Ello was created by Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger in March, 2014 and Vine was founded two years earlier than Ello (McKinney, 2014; Langer, 2013). Compared with Facebook and Twitter, Ello and Vine are too young. Thus, it is reasonable that they have the smallest numbers of users. Additionally, YouTube has more registered users who post less because most people just enjoy watching videos from it.
From figure 2 it is apparent that Facebook is the mainstream medium in social networks, so in this study we attempt to investigate personality differences between female and male college students through their Facebook activities from two aspects: neuroticism and extraversion. Previous studies indicated people who spent more time on Facebook and checked Facebook more frequently were much more neurotic, because online communication was an effective way to alleviate loneliness. For example, when I had just come to the United States from China I spent a lot of time online, because I did not have any friends here and felt seriously alone. I messaged to my friends and my parents in China, checked my social media account frequently to look at their status updates, and played games developed by social media. Nearly every night the last thing I did before sleeping was checking my social media account, and I messaged my parents to say “good night”. Social media helped me kill time and reduced my loneliness. Additionally, neuroticism can reflect people’s sensitivity extent (McCrae, 1992). Sensitive people sometimes like to chat with friends online by texting and do not like face-to-face talking. For example, when my husband does something that impresses me a lot I always message him through Facebook to express my gratefulness instead of directly saying my thankfulness. Similarly, we only say we love each other is by messaging. Thus, people with higher level of neuroticism tend to spend more time on social media and check their social media account more frequently.
Table 1 shows male Facebook users spend relatively more time on Facebook every day. More than half of female users spent less than half an hour on Facebook. The percentage of males who spend more than half an hour on Facebook every day is 21.81% higher than that of females. It is obvious in table 1 that males check their Facebook accounts more frequently than females. The percentages of males who check their Facebook accounts more than 4 times and 8 times per day are 18.19% and 1.39% higher than those of females. In table 2, it shows males use Facebook apps more than females. Consequently, male college students are more neuroticism than female college students. Unexpectedly, figure 6 shows females like to check Facebook accounts many more times than males. These results are opposite of my hypothesis that females are more neurotic than males. I think one reason may be that some females didn’t tell the truth when they took our surveys, because some people don’t like to admit that they are neurotic. Pedersen (2014) stated that romantic relationships could stabilize neurotic people, so another possible reason might be that most female participants had already had stable relationships or been married.
Ross et al. (2009) stated that extraversion is a reflection of people’s sociable ability. People’s activities, such as posting photos, sharing feelings, and connecting with public figures on social media, can imply their extraversion levels. For example, when I join parties with my friends on weekends I am used to taking funny photos and posting these photos on my social media account later. Thus, people who post photos more frequently usually have more social activities. Table 2 shows male college students post photos on their Facebook more frequently than females. The percentages of males who “sometimes”, “often”, and “usually” post photos on Facebook are 6.1%, 3.7%, and 8.6% higher than those of females respectively. Table 3 indicates males are more concerned with photos posted by their friends. Communications with friends through social media reflect not only people’s neuroticism level but also their frequency of social activities. In the survey, people were asked the frequency of connecting with old friends and messaging people. The results show males are more likely to communicate with friends on Facebook. From these points, male college students are more social than female college students. 
The major finding of this survey is that male college students are at a higher level of neuroticism and extraversion than female college students. An interesting thing can be deduced, which is that people who feel much lonelier are not always lacking social activities. Feeling lonely sometimes is a vital reason that people like to attend and organize social activities, such as parties.
There are also some limitations in our study. The most important one was that the number of our participants in the survey was not statistically enough. If we can get funding in the future we can have more samples and the further study will be conducted. Additionally, a few places of our survey should be revised and reedited. For example, when people were asked their activity of posting pictures on Facebook they used “never”, “rarely”, “sometimes”, “often”, or “usually” to describe the frequency. This is not very accurate, because people have different definitions of these frequency concepts. For example, I think posting pictures more than five times should be defined as “usually”, but my husband insists more than five times should be just “often”. Thus, if we used total number of times to describe the frequency of posting in the survey it would be better. Also, the first line of our survey should be separated into three individual parts. In this case, participants will not ignore checking their education level, sex, or whether they are from America or are international. 
Conclusion
            Based on the survey results, we analyzed the personality differences between female and male college students. We compared the time spent on Facebook and the frequency of checking Facebook between females and males to detect their neuroticism differences. The result was unexpected, that male college students were much more neurotic than females. Two possible reasons were figured out. One was that some participants might tell lies because they did not want to admit neuroticism. The other reason was that most female participants might have stable relationships or be married, which made them less neurotic. According to the participants’ major activities on Facebook, we explored the extraversion differences between females and males. The results showed that males were more extraverted and more likely to attend social activities. Consequently, male college students are more neurotic and extraverted than females. According to this point we can deduce that people who have a strong sense of loneliness may not always lack of social activities.
Charts tables and graphs



Female
Male
Time spent on Facebook every day
0-30min
61.25%
39.44%
30-60min
20%
36.62%
60-90min
12.5%
19.71%
>90min
6.25%
4.23%
Frequency of checking Facebook account
0-3
52.5%
34.72%
4-7
26.25%
44.44%
8-12
12.5%
13.89%
>12
8.75%
6.94%
Usage change on Facebook
Use it more
8.75%
16.67%
Use it less
43.75%
43.06%
The same
32.5%
33.33%
Never use
15%
6.94%

Table 1. Females and males’ time spent on Facebook, frequency to check Facebook, and the usage change on Facebook.
Facebook Activity

Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Often
Usually

F
M
F
M
F
M
F
M
F
M
Post pictures
15.8%
5.6%
27.6%
16.7%
34.2%
40.3%
17.1%
20.8%
5.3%
13.9%
Share feelings
46.1%
27.8%
28.9%
38.9%
22.4%
19.4%
2.6%
8.3%
0
1.4%
Connect with old friends
13.2%
5.6%
28.9%
16.9%
40.8%
39.4%
13.2%
13.9%
3.9%
11.2%
Use apps
77.6%
64.8%
17.1%
23.9%
2.6%
4.2%
1.3%
1.4%
1.3%
1.4%
Connect to public figures
60%
41.7%
24%
33.3%
10.7%
15.3%
4%
1.4%
1.3%
1.4%
Message people
17.3%
4.2%
26.7%
20.8%
37.3%
31.9%
10.7%
16.7%
8%
16.7%
Use hashtags
63.2%
63.9%
21.1%
19.4%
9.2%
9.7%
6.6%
1.4%
0
1.4%
 Table 2. People’s seven main activities on Facebook.

Friends’ photos
Friends’ status updates
Family interaction
Professional development
Politics
Female
81.25%
67.5%
47.5%
33.75%
13.75%
Male
86.11%
75%
55.56%
33.33%
19.44%
Table 3. The types of information people care about
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