Summary of the Research
How do the Internet and online networking innovation influence our romantic lives? This study analyzes that meeting online does not end up with couple breakup. Meeting on the web anticipates quicker transitions to marriage heterosexual people. Many scientists and scholars claim that new innovations develop or degrade longevity of primary relationship. Other skeptics believe that a bif choice may confuse people to find their life partners. Sherry Turkle skeptic argued that technologies undermine people to be social and interact face-to-face. Other researchers claim that Internet has a positive role in our life. McKenna, Green, and Gleason believe that Internet can’t affect negatively on people’s fear to build a relationship.Author of the article Michael Rosenfield examined information American couples followed for 6 years, from 2009 to 2015. He analyzed whether Internet can affect on couple breakup or rate of transition to marriage. He showed that couples who met online and face-to-face have similar rates of breakup. Moreover, Rosenfeld demonstrated that heterosexual couples who met online had faster transitions to marriage than other heterosexual couples.
Psychologists Barry Schwartz presented the theory “Choice Overload” where researchers claim that bigger choices people have harder will be to make a decision for them. Also Herbert Simon divided people into two groups “ Maximizers” and “Satisficers”. Herbert claims that a big choice disappoints maximizers. “Choice Overload” theory is one of the key ideas of that Internet meeting undermined existing relationships. Sherry Turkle gave a great example for this theory Danny who broke up with his girlfriend to find a more attractive and better girlfriend online. After all, he couldn’t find anyone who can be better his ex-girlfriend. He spent more time online and was not satisfied. In 2000 was a experiment in the supermarket with jams. Iyengar and Lepper showed that supermarket consumers tried 6 jams an average of 1.4 of the samples, and 30 percent used an offered coupon to buy jam, whereas customers presented with a larger choice of 24 jams also tried an average of 1.5 samples, but only 3 percent of the consumers who saw the larger selection used the coupon. Iyengar and Lepper summarized that the bigger choice set was demoralizing to consumers. According to Choice Overload theory, is that too many choices make more difficult to decide which is the best choice. Also, more choices make people feel less sure of their options.
Kraut et.al explained the experiment in the years 1995 and 1996 with 93 families in Pittsburgh where families had an Internet access for the first time .Kraut described that during the experiment there were less communication and more depression between family members. The Krauts’ studies have been widely cited and it proved that Internet have a negative impact on people’s face-to-face relationships. One more experiment was hold in 2002 by Manning about an informal study of divorce lawyers that most people find the lovers through the Internet.
Young’s study of “Internet addiction” stated that cyberlovers failed as real-life relationships. They get frustrated when they see real faces of people, how they act , how they look in real life. Nor Young’s and Manning’s study were broadly illustrative.
In 2012 Rosenfeld and Thomas made a HCMST (How Couples Meet and Stay Together) survey where they didn’t find any differences in breakup rate or relationship satisfaction by whether the couple had met online or face-to-face. However, in 2014 American scholar and sociologist Paul utilized HCSMT data and found that couples who met online were more likely to break up, but his researches were not replicable. After Rosenfeld provided a new analysis of HCMST and he stated that HCMST data is absolutely different from Paul’s study.
The Research Methods Used
The author used the HCMST surveys that began with a nationally representative survey of 3,009 couples in 2009 and included long-term follow-up with the same individuals in 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015. HCMST surveys were completed by Knowledge Networks/GfK. KNowledge Networks panel participants were originally drafted into the panel through a nationally representative random digit dialing phone survey. The HCMST wave 1 survey was an Internet survey, and waves 2 through 5 were Internet and phone surveys were 4.
Using the HCMST data, author analyzed two event history data sets. Also author analyzed transitions to marriage only for heterosexual couples because same-sex couples did not have a right to legal marriage in most of the states.
Author relied on time event history logistic regression . His logistic reversions are weighted using the weight variable with standard errors and clustering to account for the non independence of repeated observations of the same couple over time. Reversions without weights like HCMST variable “resource” that recognizes the oversampled groups and it predicts the weights yield similar substantive results.
Couples were asked to write the story of “How they met their partners?”. Some open-ended responses were coded by the study investigators . In addition to the 270 couples who were identified from the open-ended question as having met their partner online, an additional 19 subjects were identified from closed-ended question “Did you use an Internet service to meet ?”. 289 people who met their partner online, a subsection of 134 met their partners through Internet meeting, identified either through their answers to the open-ended questions.
Additional information such as household income , people’s race, whether person described him partner were a same-sex couple, whether person lived in a metropolitan area (time varying), person’s region of the United States,number of children, whether person and partner were coresident.
Research Results
Author provided some statistics and table as results of the survey. The couples who met online end with breakup 2.46 times higher than the couples who met in real life. In the HCMST potential data, including married couples and unmarried couples, the breakup rate was 3.9 percent a year, compared with a breakup rate of 9.5 percent a year for couples who met online. Most of the married couples in HCMST were married before 1995, before the graphical Internet. The table shows that, controlling for other factors that predict breakup for couples who met in the Internet, numbers for breakup were not significantly different for couples who met online compared with couples who met face-to-face.
Across the 6 years of the HCMST data, all couples who met offline after 1995 broke up with the percentage of 7.3 per year between 2009 and 2015. According to table (column 2) if the couples who met online after 1995 had the same figure as the couples who met offline after 1995, their breakup rate would be 7.0 percent per year.
Rosenfeld explained that heterosexual couples’ transition to marriage twice as high as those of heterosexual couples who met face-to-face. Most transitions to marriage appear in the first 10 years of the relationship.
One more point to note is that the confidence interval on the table for heterosexual couples who met through online dating is large because there were only 13 transitions to marriage in the prospective HCMST data for heterosexual couples who met their partners through online dating.Also the number of transitions to marriage of couples who met through online dating was small in the prospective HCMST, the marriages occurred so early in the relationships that the accumulative marriage rate was higher than for couples who met offline. The main risk for transition to marriage is transition to breakup.