Individual Differences in Blogging Behaviour
John Smith
Supervised by Dr Duncan Jones
Psychology Department, University of Wolverhampton, West Midlands, UK.
Corresponding email address: J.Smith1990@wlv.ac.uk
Keywords: blogs, individual differences, personality, online behaviour
Background (approx. 250-400 words)
Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular way for regular
people to promote messages to potentially worldwide audiences
(Lang, 2005). The popularity of blogs may be credited to a
number of factors. For example, blog authors may blog to manage
impressions from other people, as a form of self expression, or to
help them connect with other like minded bloggers who may have
hobbies or interests in common (Fullwood et al., 2009). Research
suggests that there may be individual differences in ones
inclination to write blogs. For example Oberlander and Nowson (2006) found that bloggers tend to
score high in the trait of openness. As openness relates to creativity and imagination, it may be the
case that many bloggers enjoy the freedom that blogs afford them for self-expression. For example,
bloggers may like to use blogs to share artistic endeavours or to show the blogging community who
they are through expressing opinions. Little in the way of research however has considered whether
bloggers with different personality profiles are likely to blog about different types of topics. The
present study adopts a Uses and Gratifications perspective (Katz et al., 1974) to investigate the link
between personality and blogging behaviour. We aimed to discover if each of the Big Five
personality traits (extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism and agreeableness) could
predict the types of topics that bloggers wrote about in their blogs. It was hypothesised that each of
the Big Five personality traits would be associated with different blog topics.
Method (approx. 100-250 words)
100 bloggers were asked to fill out two questionnaires. Bloggers were recruited by advertising the
study on a number of popular blog sites and relevant forums and through the participant pool at the
University of Wolverhampton. The first questionnaire was the International Personality Item Pool
(Goldberg, 1999), a reliable measure of the Big Five Personality traits. The second questionnaire
asked participants to indicate which of 5 specific topics they aligned with most when writing their
blogs. The topics were as follows: 1) Politics, 2) Health and Beauty, 3) News and current events, 4)
Arts and leisure, and 5) Personal life.
Findings (approx. 50-150 words)
The mean score on each of the 5 blog topic categories was calculated for each of the Big Five
personality traits. Extravert and neurotic bloggers were most likely to blog about their personal lives,
conscientious bloggers were most likely to blog about news and current events, agreeable bloggers
were most likely to blog about health and beauty and open bloggers were most likely to blog about
arts and leisure.
Table 1: Mean scores for Big Five personality traits on the 5 blog topic categories
Personality trait
Politics
Health/Beauty
News
Arts/Leisure
Personal life
Extraversion
2.56
3.45
3.90
1.41
4.10
Neuroticism
1.34
2.31
2.45
2.18
4.16
Conscientiousness
3.67
2.89
4.25
2.67
2.85
Agreeableness
1.89
4.12
2.16
2.34
3.77
Openness
3.80
2.14
3.44
4.18
1.34
Conclusions (approx. 250-400 words)
The study findings confirm predictions that bloggers of different
personality types write blogs about different topics. Extavert
bloggers may have been more inclined to write about their
personal lives because they have a greater concern for engaging
in social interaction and therefore their blogs may be used as an
outlet for talking about their relationships with other people.
Neurotic bloggers on the other hand may use their blog to talk
about their personal lives in a very different way. Namely, they
may use their blogs to talk about difficulties in their lives and therefore use their blogs to come to
terms with these difficulties or to gain support from others. Neurotic bloggers may therefore use their
blogs for catharsis. Conscientious bloggers may prefer talking about news and current events because
they may feel that discussing other topics would be frivolous and a waste of time. Agreeable
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bloggers may enjoy blogging about health and beauty because they are more concerned with
maintaining positive impressions. Therefore, they like to find out how to make themselves appear
more attractive to others. Open bloggers discuss the arts and leisure because they enjoy using their
blogs as a creative outlet. Further research may wish to explore in more detail the reasons why
specific personalities are associated with specific blog topics and may adopt a qualitative approach to
delve deeper into motivations and experiences. It may also be worthwhile to consider how bloggers
manage online impressions through the topics that they discuss. For example, research could
investigate whether specific topics and writing styles are likely to lead to more positive impressions
from others.
References
Fullwood, C., Sheehan, N. and Nicholls, W. (2009) Blog Function Revisited: A Content Analysis of
MySpace Blogs. CyberPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 16(6), pp. 685-89.
Katz, E., Blumler, J.G. and Gurevitch, M. (1974) Utilization of mass communication by the
individual. In J.G. Blumler and E. Katz (Eds.) The uses of mass communications: Current
perspectives on gratifications research (pp. 19-32). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lang, E.M. (2005) Would you, could you, should you blog? Journal of Accountancy, 199(6), pp. 3641.
Oberlander, J. and Nowson, S. (2006) Whose thumb is it anyway? Classifying author personality
from weblog text. The proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguists 2006. Sydney,
Australia.
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