Early relationship development : a prospective longitudinal study on new online dating relationships
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The beginning of a relationship's trajectory, after two partners first meet but before they become an official couple, is a period of uncertain, potentially turbulent, and often exciting growth. All relationships -- successful or not -- go through these early stages and the decisions made during this period could be life-changing. What does this early period of relationship development look like and how do we know whether a new potential relationship will succeed or fail? The present dissertation longitudinally and prospectively followed 82 single online daters across 12 weeks to study real-world early relationship development as it occurs. I tested and found support for the positive association between sociosexuality and the number of potential partners a person is romantically interested in at a given period of time. I then explored a subsample of the data, focusing on new potential relationships (i.e., relationships in which participants met the potential partner within 72 hours of first reporting on them), using descriptive analyses, survival analyses, and growth modeling. I found that there is great variation in relationship trajectories during this early period -- with each trajectory differing in their intercepts, slopes, and shapes -- and this variation made it difficult to capture a systematic effect of time on romantic interest in the growth models. From the survival analyses, I found that most new potential relationships do not last beyond a week, and of the ones that do last, most become romantic after about three weeks of dating. These findings provide insight into early relationship development and future directions for the fields of close relationships and communication.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Huang, Sabrina Angela |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hancock, Jeff |
| Thesis advisor | Hancock, Jeff |
| Thesis advisor | Eastwick, Paul |
| Thesis advisor | Harari, Gabriella |
| Thesis advisor | Ram, Nilam |
| Degree committee member | Eastwick, Paul |
| Degree committee member | Harari, Gabriella |
| Degree committee member | Ram, Nilam |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Communication |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sabrina Angela Huang. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Communication. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/gx602bw0548 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Sabrina Angela Huang
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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