The influence of personality traits on information seeking behaviour of students

The present study was undertaken with the objective to explore the influence of the five personality dimensions on the information seeking behaviour of the students in higher educational institutions. Information seeking behaviour is defined as the sum total of all those activities that are usually undertaken by the students of higher education to collect, utilize and process any kind of informationneeded for their studies. Data has been collected from 600 university students of the three broad disciplines of studies from the Universities of Eastern part of India (West Bengal). The tools used for the study were General Information schedule (GIS), Information Seeking Behaviour Inventory (ISBI) and NEO-FFI Personality Inventory. Product moment correlation has been worked out between the scores in ISBI and those in NEO-FFI Personality Inventory. The findings indicated that the five personality traits are significantly correlated to all the dimensions of information seeking behaviourof the university students.