Several items of interest were brought to light subsequent to the coding of the collected information. It was found by the interviewer that 92.3% of the participants access the Internet more than once per day, tending to use messaging services (100%) and electronic mail (80.8%) most frequently to communicate with the people they have met online. Also, 92.3% of the respondents answered that they initially met and began talking to these people over a year ago; the other 7.7% had done do within the past six months. Additionally, the frequency with which the participants communicate with their online acquaintances was split almost equally among the four options given in the answer set, with the highest percentage, 38.5%, choosing the option "almost every time I'm online" (see Appendix for other percentages).
Further evaluation unveiled several additional trends. One interesting tendency became apprent after analysis of questions nine through twelve (see Appendix for a full list of survey questions). While both male and female respondents overwhelmingly replied that their lies were "not significant" both in online (84.6%) and real-life (100%) communication, there were drastic differencs in the patterns of dishonesty between the sexes. In both CMC and real life, the frequencies of female lies exceeded the males in every category except "hobbies/interests." This in no way supports the researcher's initial hypothesis, which expected "hobbies/interests" to be an other-centered category, more frequently attracting female dishonesty. Females admitted to telling a wider range of online lies overall, each person choosing, on average, three categories of lies apiece. The males, conversely, reported less extensive lies; they admitted to no lies in the online categories "age," "sex," and "job/income," and typically chose only two categories of lies each (for a graphical representation, see Figure 1 & Figure 2). Conflicting with the researcher's hypothesis, the male and female trends of dishonesty did not fall into the self-centered and other-centered categories. Female lies both online and in real life tended to be in nearly every category, while male lies were more sparse. All tendencies in this dishonesty were unrelated to the trend in question.
Furthermore, the data did not support the experimenter's hypothesis that the majority of respondents would have lied at least once in their online relationships. As it happened, the number of participants who reported having lied through CMC was exactly equal to the number that claimed honesty. A slight sex difference was revealed during investigation of this data, showing that women (53.3%) were somewhat more likely than men (45.5%) to lie to those that they met through CMC.
Lastly, the data only partially supported the experimenter's third hypothesis, which predicted that participants would decsribe their lies in CMC as more habitual and more serious than the lies they told in real life. Data collected from questions six through ten was used to investigate this hypothesis. Interestingly, respondents were most likely to answer that they lie "occasionally" while communicating online (61.5%), while they were most likely to lie "almost never" in real-life exchange (61.5%) (see Figure 3). This data was in support of the researcher's hypothesis. However, the data from questions nine and ten conflicted with the aforementioned hypothesis; participants were most likely to answer that their lies were "not significant" in both online and real-life communication.
Generally speaking, most of the researcher's hypotheses were not supported. All data that has not been addressed here in detail was either insignificant to the researcher's goals in carrying out the study, or displayed no appreciable trends. |
