Abstract:

Social networks allow initiating and maintaining online relationships, meeting new people and sharing personal information. Bridging social capital refers to ‘‘weak ties’’– loose connections between individuals who may provide useful information or new perspectives; bonding social capital is accumulated through ‘‘strong ties’’– relationships with family and close friends; maintaining social capital refers to the ability of getting assistance from a previously inhabited community.

Research shows that social relationships with friends and neighbors as well with Facebook friends are related to indices of psychological well-being, such as self-esteem and satisfaction with life. These social relationships and well-being of the participants may be affected by their willingness to disclose personal. In addition, self-disclosure itself might be affected by personality traits and privacy concerns of the participants.
This study examines the impact of e-privacy management and personality traits on the extent of disclosing personal information on social network Facebook, which in turn is related to bonding and bridging social capital and to the participants' well-being. The research crosschecks a quantitative online surveying 115 Facebook users (age 18-37, 40% male) with a qualitative investigation of 12 participants revealing their personal experience in the network.

The online survey included 5 parts.
(1) Participant e-privacy management was assessed as "public account", "account open to friends only" and "custom account".
(2) Introversion-extraversion personality trait was measured based on the Big Five personality model (Costa & McCrae, 1992).
(3) Self-disclosure was assessed by online self-disclosure questionnaire (Leung, 2002).
(4) Social capital was measured by the Social Capital Scale adapted to the Facebook context (Ellison et al., 2007).
(5) Psychological well-being was assessed by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) and by Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1989).

In the qualitative part of this study face-to-face semi-structured interviews explored participants' experiences and reasons for a particular preference of e-privacy management, as well as their perceptions of social and psychological benefits and costs of disclosing personal information through the social networking platform.

The analyses of variance indicated that managing privacy settings affects the depth, honesty, and the intent of self-disclosure on Facebook. However, participant extroversion-introversion trait affected the intent of self-disclosure, but not its depth and honesty. These results are consistent with the impact of social networking on introverts according to the "poor get richer" claim. Pearson correlations indicate that people revealing personal information in an honest way, tend to be satisfied with their lives, and people who have high awareness of exposure of personal information on the social network value themselves positively. In addition, high social capital is associated with a high level of life satisfaction.

The results of the qualitative analysis raised five main themes of personal experiences on Facebook:
(1) reference to reasons for sharing information,
(2) expressing privacy concerns,
(3) sharing of selective information in order to address privacy concerns,
(4) accumulation of social capital as a benefit of social networking and
(5) diminishing a negative consequence of online information sharing - information overload.

Keywords:

E-privacy management, personality traits of Facebook users, online self-disclosure, social capital, well-being.