Nothing to LOL about: Texting (Mis)communications in Intimate Relationships

Event Center A&B

Technological advancements have facilitated interpersonal communication. For example, partners now communicate more often via electronic means, such as text messaging. However, computermediated communications (CMC) lack nonverbal cues that help accurately encode and decode messages. The opportunities for greater communication come with a tradeoff of possible miscommunication. Previous research indicates that communication mediums such as text messaging (i.e., texting) contain an overreliance on the sender’s perspective during transmission (Kruger, Eply, Park, & Ng, 2005). In this study, we focused on the miscommunications that occur between relational partners during text exchanges. We recruited an ethnically diverse sample of men and women from websites (e.g., Craigslist.org), social media sites (e.g., Facebook.com), and a university participant pool (i.e., SONA Systems). Participants responded to an online survey containing open and closed-ended questions that were designed to investigate general attitudes toward text messaging in the formation and maintenance of romantic relationships, and the influence of texting toward their relationship satisfaction. We found that, regardless of demographic traits, participants reported having experienced misunderstandings in their interpretations of text messages. Insecure attachment styles reported lower relative relationship satisfaction, greater texting frequency compared to other groups, and had more negative interpretations of their partner’s text messages. Text messaging attitudes also varied by gender; males preferred to use text messaging for practical and/or sexual communications, whereas women were more likely to use text messages for relationship maintenance. Applications for these findings are discussed, including how they may be generalized to other relationship types (e.g, friendships, business).