Personality-Driven Adoption of WhatsApp and Facebook for Educational Collaboration: Academic Performance as a Mediator

Abstract

The Big Five Personality Traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are widely regarded as a comprehensive framework for understanding individual differences. These traits influence various behaviors, including social interactions, learning preferences, and technology adoption. Objectives of the study were; 1) To analyze the relationship between the Big Five Personality Traits and students' adoption of WhatsApp and Facebook for educational collaboration. 2) To investigate the association between social network site usage and academic performance of the students. 3) To evaluate the mediating role of academic performance in the relationship between the Big Five Personality Traits and the educational use of WhatsApp and Facebook. All 8617 Students of grade 10th of District Attock, (4,868 Boys & 3,749 Girls) at secondary and higher secondary school level in 248 public schools were the population of the study. 816 students were the sample for this study from the population. Proportional Sampling technique was used for sampling. Big Five Personality Tool consists of 39, Usage of Social Network Sites tool consists of twenty nine different items for five basic and commonly used Social Network Sites. Reliability of the tools was found by using Cronbach’s Alpha. For content validity, both research tools were validated from the experts of field of education while for construct validity, EFA was performed. The findings from the PROCESS procedure (Model 4) offer insights into the relationships between Big Five Personality Traits (BFPTs), Academic Performance (AP), and Social Network Sites (SNSs). The analysis shows that BFPTs significantly predict Scholastic Performance (SP), with a positive coefficient of 1.528 (p < 0.01). The model's R-squared value of 0.528 indicates that 52.81% of the variance in Scholastic Performance can be explained by BFPTs. This relationship suggests that students' personality traits are strongly related to their academic performance. Hence, it is recommended that, Interventions should focus on improving both Scholastic Performance and personality traits to help students manage their social media usage effectively.