Samenvatting

Online social networking sites, such as Facebook, have grown in popularity in recent
years and they provide an exciting new area of study. Facebook provides individuals
with easy access to view personal information about their friends, coworkers, and
even complete strangers (Muise, Christofides, and Desmarais, 2009). Facebook has
over 500 million active users and every month over 700 billion minutes are spent on
Facebook (Facebook, 2011). Among U.S. college students, for instance, 96% have a
Facebook account. In Greece, Facebook is the primary social network used by the
majority of the population. Given the popularity of Facebook in Greece, the current
study was designed to investigate the relationship between Facebook use and
personality characteristics, in college students.
Prior research has investigated the relationship between personality traits and
Facebook usages (Amichai-Hamburger and Vinitzky 2010) and their differences in
information sharing (Pempek Yermolayeva and Calvert 2009). It is the focus of the
present study to expand such studies and investigate the effect of personality traits
such as Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and
Neuroticism on the level and way Greek college students use Facebook. Overall, 367
college students from the two largest Universities in Northern Greece participated in
the study.