The role of personality factors in young adults’ motives for sharing alcohol references on social networking sites

Abstract

Sharing alcohol-related content on social media has been linked to young adults’ alcohol use. Therefore, it is important to understand why these references are shared in the first place. As such, the first aim of this study was to identify the motives (social, entertainment, information/identification) that predict the sharing of alcohol references through an online survey of young Dutch adults (N = 339, Mage = 22.67 years, SDage = 3.04 years, 69.4% women). The second aim was to investigate individual differences in motives by examining whether motives mediate the relationship between personality traits (agreeableness, neuroticism, extroversion) and internal states (need for popularity) and sharing alcohol-related content. Our findings showed that identification/information (and not social or entertainment) motives and extroversion directly predicted the sharing of alcohol-related content. Moreover, respondents with a great need for popularity scored higher on all sharing motives, but only identification/information motives mediated the relationship between the need for popularity and sharing alcohol-related content. Thus, extroverted and popularity-oriented individuals are highly likely to post alcohol-related content. Overall, our findings show that certain motives predict the sharing of alcohol references on social media and that certain groups of individuals may be particularly prone to sharing such content, which makes them potential targets for interventions.