Motives for Creating a Private Website and Personality of Personal Homepage Owners in Terms of Extraversion and Heuristic Orientation

The purpose of this study was to investigate personal characteristics of homepage owners as well as motives for creating an own homepage. Questionnaires were obtained from 102 personal website owners. Our results show that personal homepage owners are more extraverted compared to the general population. Furthermore, the personality of personal homepage owners differ from the general population since their cognitive style is more heuristic. However, within our sample bloggers did not differ from non-bloggers. The analyses concerning the motives showed that the main reasons for the participants to create and maintain an own homepage are enjoyment, exercise in terms of web design, and self-portrayal. Thereby, extraversion scores are highest for individuals who own a homepage with the objective to portray themselves. In contrast, the motive “exercise” refers to higher scores in terms of heuristic orientation. Since we assessed an Internet survey, self-selection biases may limitate our results.

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