14 DAY TRIAL // People having Internet access at home are more likely to be in a romantic relationship than those without Internet access, a new study presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association said.
Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University and the lead author of the study called “Meeting Online: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary”, suggested that Internet might soon replace friends as the main way that Americans meet their romantic partners, especially for same-gender couples.
“Although prior research on the social impacts of Internet use has been rather ambiguous about the social cost of time spent online, our research suggests that Internet access has an important role to play in helping Americans find mates.”
For this study, data was taken from the Wave I of the How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) survey, a study that included 4,002 adults, of which 3,009 had a romantic partner or were married.
82.2 percent of the participants that had Internet access at home also were in a relationship, compared to a 62.9-percent partnership rate for people without Internet access.
Rosenfeld and study co-author Reuben J. Thomas, an assistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York also found that, besides the fact that people are more likely to be in romantic relationships if they have Internet at home, the Internet is becoming the most important place for meeting people.
“With the meteoric rise of the Internet as a way couples have met in the past few years, and the concomitant recent decline in the central role of friends, it is possible that in the next several years the Internet could eclipse friends as the most influential way Americans meet their romantic partners, displacing friends out of the top position for the first time since the early 1940s," Rosenfeld stated.
Internet is also extremely important for finding potential partners in groups that are more difficult to identify, such as middle-aged straight or gay communities, the study concluded.
Rosenfeld said that “couples who meet online are much more likely to be same-gender couples, and somewhat more likely to be from different religious backgrounds.
“The Internet is not simply a new and more efficient way to keep in touch with our existing networks; rather the Internet is a new kind of social intermediary that may reshape the kinds of partners and relationships we have,” he added.
61 percent of same-gender couples and 21.5 percent of straight couples that met within the two years of the HCMST Wave I survey in the winter of 2009, met online.