The Development of Online and Offline Romantic Relationships: A Turning Point Study by Sophia W. McDowell
Because there was some concern that online romantic partners who had never been in any prior offline romantic relationships might be considerably different from those who had previously had offline relationships, several tests were done to explore possible differences between these sub-groups. It was found that 72% of online participants had previously had a face-to-face (FtF) romantic relationship. The two sub-groups included similar proportions of men and women, were slightly different in racial make-up, with the group having no previous FtF romantic experience including a larger proportion of Asians (28.6% vs. 5.5%), and slightly fewer Caucasians (60.7% vs. 79.5%). The rest of the racial differences were hard to interpret because of very small group sizes and because some categories actually had no representatives at all. In addition, the typical marital status of participants in the two sub-groups was different (c 2 = 9.30, df = 2, p = .01), with the largest difference being the online-only group’s larger proportion of divorced individuals (33.3%). The group with past FtF romantic experience was also significantly older (M = 28.90, SD = 9.02) than the group with no past FtF experience (M = 24.86, SD = 7.71) (t = 2.10, df = 99, p < .05).