Research on Relationship between Personality Traits and Online Behaviour in Adolescents (With VKontakte Social Media as an Example)

Abstract

The paper presents and discusses outcomes of the first stage of a research project on the role of social media in the life of modern adolescents that was carried out on basis of the MSUPE Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Modern Childhood in 2015—2018. The issue of adolescents’ self-presentation in social media is one of the key trends in modern research, and in Russian psychological and pedagogical science there is clearly a lack of works on various aspects of adolescent online behaviour and interaction, in particular, in social media websites. The sample of our empirical study consisted of 88 individuals aged 15—18 years, and the following techniques were used: a modified version of A.Ye. Lichko’s character accentuations questionnaire; Stephenson’s Q-Sort technique; the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory; the Tomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument; Eyesenck’s Self-Evaluation of Mental States technique; content analysis of VKontakte webpages. As it was revealed, personality traits of the adolescents were closely interrelated with the structure of their profiles in the VK website. For instance, numerous correlations were found between various parameters of personal webpages and such personality traits as character accentuations, interpersonal conflicts, preferred type of conflict behaviour, as well as with levels of anxiety, rigidity, aggression and frustration.

Keywords

• adolescence
• social media
• self-presentation
• web profile