Quitting Facebook The people who do!

According to researchers at the University of Vienna have just published the results of a study examining the temperament and demographics of the people who leave Facebook, shedding light on what distinguishes those who commit “virtual identity suicide” from the rest of us still enduring the “pokes.”

The team surveyed 310 people who had quit Facebook and 321 Facebook members on their personality traits, Internet addiction tendencies and attitudes toward privacy to see if certain patterns would emerge. The respondents consisted of people from all over the world who were recruited online and volunteered to take the study, though they're a small sample compared to the entirety of Facebook users and are not necessarily representative of all Facebook quitters.

According to those surveyed, it turns out that the people who leave Facebook aren’t so different from the rest of us. They’re also worried about who sees their photos, annoyed by Facebook’s constant changes, irritated by superficial social interactions and concerned by how many hours they spend glassy-eyed and slack-jawed staring at their screens.

And even among those who haven't quit Facebook, a large number say they've considered it. Nearly half (46.8 percent) of the current Facebook users surveyed said they’d previously considered quitting the site. A full 61 percent of members say they've taken extended breaks from Facebook, lasting several weeks or more, according to areport from the Pew Research Center published this year.

Yet the University of Vienna study did find several key attributes that characterized those who'd killed off their Facebook accounts:

- They’re more likely to be men: Among those who had deactivated their accounts, the majority (71.5 percent) were male. Among those who currently used Facebook, the majority (70.5 percent) were female.

Source: huffingtonpost