Several items of interest were brought to light subsequent to the coding of the collected information. It was found by the interviewer that all of the ten participants had used the Internet to help them maintain a relationship over a long distance, and that every single one found it helpful. Also, there was unanimous agreement among the interviewees that they talked to these people more frequently overall since they first began speaking online, however five of the ten found that there was a decrease in the frequency with which they talked to them on the phone, face to face, or through letters. Additionally, all of the respondents revealed they had misunderstood someone or been misunderstood while talking online.
Outside of these few responses, the data was not completely unanimous. However, a few findings of interest can be listed at this juncture. The data did not support the experimenter's hypothesis that respondents would convey difficulty judging the context of those they speak with, but improvement in the ease of assessing this since the introduction of emoticons. Only two of the ten participants said they had trouble understanding context while using CMC. Another two said they had no trouble at all, while the remaining six explained that their level of difficulty depended on whom they were talking to. In regard to the benefits of emoticons, only fifty percent of respondents declared them useful. Twenty percent felt they were somewhat helpful, while another thirty percent said they weren't useful at all.
Another discrepancy with the expected occurred between the researcher's hypothesis and the participants' responses to question "5h" (see Appendix for complete interview protocol). In this interview question, the interviewer asked the participants whether Internet use made their "relationships seem more or less emotional." While it was predicted that the majority of participants would say "Less," it was found that only ten percent of the experimental population, a single participant, felt this was true. Another fifty percent, on the other hand, felt that Internet use made their relationships more emotional, while the remaining forty percent felt it had little to no affect on the emotionality of their relationship.
A final point of interest was the formation of trust on the Internet. On this response as well, the participants answered differently than was anticipated. While the researcher expected that the respondents would be inhibited in trusting those whom they met online, at least initially, quite the opposite of this was revealed by the data. The interviewer asked two questions regarding both the participant's trust of others online, and their own personal trustworthiness as an Internet user. In response to the initial "trusting" question, only about twenty-nine percent--two participants out of the seven who had met and formed a relationship with an unfamiliar person online--had difficulty trusting the people they met. The remaining seventy-one percent trusted their new conversation partners right off the bat. It was interesting, however, that the two participants who stated their distrust for strangers online, were the same two that could not be trusted; these two contributors were the only ones that acknowledged their dishonesty with they person they met in the second, "trustworthiness" question.
Generally speaking, most of the researcher's hypotheses were not supported. All data that has not been addressed here was either not relevant to the researcher's expectations or goals in carrying out the study, or displayed no appreciable trends. |
