As regards the cultural aspect of Facebook, a review of the literature reveals that the previous studies only focused on comparing the patterns of SNS use in different countries (Singh et al., 2006; Gong et al., 2007). Vasalou et al. (2010) showed differences in Facebook use between different countries. For example, users from the UK spent more time on Facebook than users from other countries. For UK users, participation in Facebook groups was more important than for US users, while Italians preferred participating in groups, and playing games. In Greece, users regarded updating their profiles as the least important (Vasalou et al., 2010). Differences in the motivation to use Facebook were also revealed in the research carried out by Ji et al. (2010). Comparing three countries: South Korea, China, and the USA, they found that there were differences in the relations between loneliness, the sense of social capital, and SNS use. When communicating with other users, US users mainly focused on exchanging opinions and passing on information, while Korean and Chinese users were also concerned about the emotional climate of this form of communication (Ji et al., 2010).

The need of belonging is strongly related to cultural factors, especially to the individualism/collectivism dimension. In individualistic cultures (e.g., in the American culture), it is the individual's achievements and successes that are valued, while in collectivistic cultures (e.g., Chinese) the most important thing is harmony with the group and being part of it (Oyserman et al., 2002). Nadkarni and Hofmann (2012) hypothesized that people from individualistic cultures have a greater tendency to post private information and more often bring up controversial subjects on Facebook than users from collectivistic cultures. Jackson and Wang (2013) indicate that users from the Chinese culture, where collectivistic values dominate, use social networks less often than people from the American culture. A study among Palestinian youth in Abbas and Mesch (2015) indicated that cultural values such as collectivism, power distance, or uncertainty avoidance predict motivation for using Facebook for maintaining existing relationships.

So far, studies have drawn on Hofstede's theory (Hofstede, 1980), which describes culture on dimensions such as individualism—collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, or masculinity—femininity when attempting to determine intercultural differences in Facebook use (e.g., Ji et al., 2010). Power distance reflects the way people view the level of power distribution in their culture and accept their place in the social hierarchy. Individualism vs. Collectivism describes the level of integration with the group, which shows whether importance is placed on attaining personal or group goals. The Uncertainty—Avoidance dimension shows the degree to which societies tolerate unknown situations, changes, and unexpected events. The Masculinity vs. Femininity dimension reflects what kind of values are respected—for instance: assertiveness, ambition, or power are related to masculine values whereas human relationship building is characteristic for feminine values.

However, researchers point out that Hofstede's theory is difficult to use in research on motivation because of social, political, economic, and other changes experienced by various countries, and that this theory does not take the dynamics of these transformations into account. What is more, this theory does not successfully explain cultural differences in studies on the Internet. For this reason, in the present study we draw on the self-construal theory (Singelis, 1994). This theory concerning the independence and interdependence of the self and the other has been successfully used to predict media use (Tamam et al., 2009) and social media use (Kim et al., 2010).

Independent self-construal refers to concentration on being separate from others and on the desire to discover the unique proprieties of the individual, although the social group, and others are still important for people with independent self-construal. A crucial issue here is the autonomy and independence of the self and emphasis on setting and realizing individual goals. By contrast, for people with a high level of interdependent self-construal it is important to maintain interdependence and contact with others, which means perceiving themselves as inseparable from others. All decisions and behaviors of such persons are always analyzed with regard to others (Singelis, 1994). In a study of self-construal in 29 countries under Singelis' framework, there were four factors constituting this construct: group loyalty, understood as a sense of duty and obligation toward the group; uniqueness, defined as a feeling of uniqueness, and personal reward; low context, connected with directness in communication; and relational interdependence, understood as in-group harmony and relation (Fernández et al., 2005). Okabe (1983, p. 38; as cited in Abbas and Mesch, 2015, p. 8) characterized low context cultures as follows: “where very little is taken for granted, greater cultural diversity, and heterogeneity are likely to make verbal skills more necessary and, therefore, more highly prized.” The dimensions of low context and relational interdependence of the self are not related to individualism. Whereas, uniqueness and a low level of group loyalty are not related to masculinity culture, there is a preference in this culture for achievement and heroism, and the social roles are clearly distinct. Interdependent self-construal emphasizes social relationships and sharing—for example, sharing joy with others—while in independent self-construal it is autonomy and competition that are important (Fernández et al., 2005). Kim et al. (2010) suggested using the concept of self-construal for predicting behaviors connected with SNS. They indicated that people focused on social relationships and, consequently, characterized by strongly interdependent self-construal have higher motivation to strengthen relations through SNS and derive greater satisfaction from SNS use.

There are many studies suggesting associations between Internet use and personality (Senol-Durak and Durak, 2011; Durak and Senol-Durak, 2014) and between Facebook use and personality characteristics (e.g., Moore and McElroy, 2012; Jenkins-Guarnieri et al., 2013; Seidman, 2013). According to Ryan and Xenos (2011), several studies have found that Facebook users are characterized by higher levels of extraversion (Wilson et al., 2010; Gosling et al., 2011; Ryan and Xenos, 2011) as well as by lower levels of conscientiousness (Wilson et al., 2010; Ryan and Xenos, 2011) and social isolation (Ryan and Xenos, 2011) than those who do not use Facebook. Besides, agreeableness is not related to overall Facebook use (Ross et al., 2009; Moore and McElroy, 2012), but those high in agreeableness are especially likely to use Facebook as a tool for communicating with others (Moore and McElroy, 2012; Seidman, 2013). Ross et al. (2009) revealed that the direction of the relationship between neuroticism and Facebook use depends on the actions taken on that site: low neuroticism is associated with a preference for uploading images, and high neuroticism is related to the preference for writing on the site's general forum. Seidman (2013) found associations between the Big Five traits (Five-Factor Model of personality) and various motives for using Facebook—for example, extraversion and openness turned out to be related to communication, agreeableness to searching for information and expression of the actual self (positive associations), and conscientiousness to communication and expression of the ideal self (negative associations). As it turned out, high levels of agreeableness and neuroticism were predictors of the need for belonging. In contrast, a high level of neuroticism, and a low level of conscientiousness were predictors of the need for self-presentation (Seidman, 2013). The need for self-presentation is satisfied by the disclosure of information about oneself, posting pictures, and creating one's image on Facebook.

Our previous analysis revealed that the level of Facebook intrusion differs depending on the country of residence (Błachnio et al., 2016); therefore, looking for predictors of this phenomenon seems to be legitimate. The aim of the paper is to expand knowledge on the cultural and personality determinants of Facebook intrusion (see Figure 1). Based on the above overview of research the four factors related to culture (group loyalty, uniqueness, low context, and relational interdependence) as well as the five dimensions of personality (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience) can be expected to be associated with Facebook intrusion.

A total of 2628 Facebook users took part in the study conducted across eight countries, namely: China (n = 388), Greece (n = 253), Israel (n = 311), Italy (n = 317), Poland (n = 453), Romania (n = 273), Turkey (n = 395), and the USA (n = 238). In the whole sample, the mean age of the participants was 26.06 (SD = 10.71). As regards country-specific samples, the mean age was M = 19.07 (SD = 1.34) in China, M = 27.05 (SD = 9.05) in Greece, M = 32.14 (SD = 13.70) in Israel, M = 24.66 (SD = 6.52), in Italy, M = 35.01 (SD = 13.74) in Poland, M = 20.48 (SD = 1.83) in Romania, M = 23.56 (SD = 5.99) in Turkey, and M = 23.65 (SD = 10.96) in the USA. In the whole sample, 54% of the participants were women. The percentages of women in country-specific samples were as follows: 63% for China, 40% for Greece, 81% for Israel, 67% for Italy, 52% for Poland, 46% for Romania, 69% for Turkey, and 72% for the USA.

The participants fulfilled one criterion: they were Facebook users. We used the snowball sampling procedure to recruit participants. A link to online questionnaires was sent to Facebook users, who were informed about the anonymity of the research. The participants received no remuneration for taking part in our research project. None of them was excluded from the study. Some results of the survey, unrelated to the objective of the current study, have been presented elsewhere (Błachnio et al., 2016). It should be explained that Facebook is unavailable in some regions in China. The Chinese participants were asked not about Facebook use but about their use of “SNS.” Because the cross-cultural equivalence of the instrument measuring Facebook intrusion was acceptable for China (see below), we decided to add the data from the Chinese sample. Also worth noting is a study in which the Internet Addiction Test was adapted to the Facebook context and yielded reliable results (Dantlgraber et al., 2016). The study was approved by the ethics committee.

The participants from eight countries completed an online survey measuring Facebook intrusion, cultural dimensions, and personality. All the questionnaires used had been previously published in English and were therefore translated into the native language of each country surveyed.

The Facebook Intrusion Questionnaire, developed by Elphinston and Noller (2011), is based on behavioral addiction components and on a scale measuring phone involvement. It consists of eight items (e.g., I have been unable to reduce my Facebook use) measuring the relations between the tendency to Facebook involvement and eight aspects of behavioral addiction, namely: cognitive salience, behavioral salience, interpersonal conflict, conflict with other activities, euphoria, loss of control, withdrawal, as well as relapse and reinstatement. The items are rated on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Chinese participants were asked about their use of “SNS” in each item instead.

To assess the factor structure equivalence of Facebook intrusion, we compared the results of factor analysis performed on the whole aggregated sample (all countries, N = 2628) with the solutions obtained in each of the eight countries (as in Sircova et al., 2014). As Facebook intrusion is a unidimensional measure, to extract a single general factor, we applied principal components analysis and extracted the first unrotated factor. The solution for the whole aggregated sample is presented in Table 1. Factor loadings for each person were saved using the regression method. This analysis was done first on the whole sample, and then in each country separately. The procedure yielded two factor loadings for each person—one relating to the pooled solution, and the second one to the country. We compared the two sets of factor loadings using Tucker's phi (Table 2).

The analyses were done using SPSS 21 package. Tucker's phi coefficients were calculated by means of an Excel spreadsheet containing the formula.

The eigenvalue of the general factor was 3.99, and the percentage of variance explained was 49.82.

By all conventions, the Tucker's phi indicated (see Table 2) a good cross-cultural equivalence of Facebook intrusion (Lorenzo-Seva and Berge, 2006), but the results of the Chinese sample showed somewhat lower congruence, although acceptable at the lowest threshold.

The Singelis Scale—the shortened, 13-item version of Singelis (1994) scale—was used to measure Independent—Interdependent self-construal (Fernández et al., 2005). An example item is I act the same way no matter who I am with. The scale has four factors: group loyalty, uniqueness, low context, and relational interdependence. The items are rated on a 4-point Likert scale from 1 = totally disagree to 4 = totally agree.

The Ten-Item Personality Inventory (Gosling et al., 2003) measuring the Big Five dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. It consists of 10 items, 2 items for each of the 5 dimensions. The items are characteristics related to each dimension, for instance extraverted, enthusiastic; reserved, quiet. The items are rated on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree.

To examine the role of Facebook intrusion in terms of the set of individual variables while controlling for and taking into account the variables related to Country (different cultures), we performed multilevel (hierarchical) analysis with Country as the variable in which the individual ones were nested. We used HLM 7 software (Raudenbush et al., 2011) to perform the multilevel analyses.

First, a null mode was created, in which the only predictor of the Facebook intrusion was Country. We used it to calculate the intra-class coefficient (ICC), which may be used to test whether multilevel testing is needed (a nonsignificant ICC would suggest that it is not). The ICC in the null model was 0.034 (chi-square = 58.21, df = 7, p < 0.001). The significant ICC suggested that multilevel modeling was needed, although it was rather low and perhaps significant due to the large sample.

Next, we tested a multilevel model, entering all variables as random. The intercept of the equation of personality variables (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience) was significantly associated with the random effect of Country and with the random effect of the variables related to Country: group loyalty, uniqueness, low context, and relational interdependence. Any significant effect of these variables would suggest that the mean score of the dependent variable is affected by them. In sum, the model was a two-level one. All variables were grand-mean centered before being entered into the model. The results are summarized in Table 4.

The multilevel analyses including data from eight countries shows that some of the country and personality variables are predictors of Facebook intrusion (see Figure 2). As we can see in the Table 4, at the country level, uniqueness predicted Facebook intrusion negatively (B = −4.37, p = 0.02) and low context predicted it positively (B = 4.39, p = 0.03). As regards the personality level, both conscientiousness (B = −1.02, p = 0.04) and emotional stability (B = −1.02, p = 0.01) negatively predicted Facebook intrusion.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.