A Study Of The Relationship Between Adolescents' Internet Use And Their Personality Traits

In the current study, Adolescents' Internet use and their relationship with individual differences in personality are explored from a developmental perspective with the study instrument of questionnaires. Compared with the previous research concerned, the significance of the relationship between Internet use and personality traits is prioritized in this present research. Firstly, the literature reviews of psychological research on Internet use are introduced, which are followed with a five-factor model of Personality to testify the relationships between Internet use and personality of adolescents. Secondly, several explorations related to the topic are demonstrated in this thesis, such as Internet internal environment and behavior of users, effects of Internet attitude, Internet use motivation, user's social support, self-consistency and congruence, self-esteem and loneliness. Lastly, the current research ends with the findings of a causal model of adolescents'Internet use and personality traits as well as the other influential factors.Based on the findings above, more conclusions are presented in the following:1) Adolescents have a lower, general evaluation on Internet environment and they are not satisfied with it;Adolescents have positive behaviors rather than negative behaviors on Internet; Adolescents have a higher self-evaluation on Internet;The commonly and frequently negative Internet behaviors are cheating, legpulling and adventuring, etc;The Internet use motivations are Chat on-line, amusement, information reception, correspondance, emotional modulation,etc. Internet use only has a negative influence on a few numbers of the adolescents;.2) Adolescents most frequently use Chat on-line, which is sequently followed with amusement, general information browse, e-mail, etc.In addition, there is no gender significant difference between Internet use and user's surfing time. But there does exist gender significant difference between use time and concrete Internet use behavior. Furthermore, there are significant differences among different grades in terms of Internet use, user's surfing time, use time and concrete behaviors.3) There is significant relationship between Internet use and personality traits, the personality is a decisive factor on adolescent's Internet use;4) There are also some factors, including Internet use attitude, Internet use motivation, user's social support, self-consistency and congruence, self-esteem and loneliness, which have an important impact on adolescent's Internet use;5) The pathological Internet use, which is influenced by the user's personality traits, is also affected by other factors mentioned above.It is expected to get some useful implications from this study with the purpose of shedding more lights on the other related research.