Digital Citizenship and the Big Five Personality Traits

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the internet has become an increasingly important venue for political expression, community building, and social activism. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have endeavored to understand and measure how these transformations have affected individuals’ civic attitudes and behaviors. The Digital Citizenship Scale (original and revised form) has become one of the most widely used instruments for measuring and evaluating these changes, but to date, no study has investigated how digital citizenship behaviors relate to exogenous variables. Using the classic Big Five Factor model of personality (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), this study investigated how personality traits relate to the key components of digital citizenship. Survey results were gathered across three countries (n = 1820), and analysis revealed that personality traits map uniquely on to digital citizenship in comparison to traditional forms of civic engagement. The implications of these findings are discussed.