Texting in Romantic Relationships: “I lvoe u” and Other Typographical Errors

Danbi Jang, Tomoe Murata, Mayu Yamamoto, Gale Nickels

This research study investigates how young men and women in relationships react toward typos and seeks to identify any differences. Based on previous research findings, we hypothesized that women are more likely to retype typos compared to men since men have been shown to communicate primarily for practicality, while women have been shown to put more social importance on texting. An alternative hypothesis we investigated was that as the intimacy levels and mutual understanding increase within the relationship, both partners prefer to leave typos uncorrected. To test these hypotheses, participants were asked to fill out a survey, asking about the length of the texting and relationship periods, how close they think they are with their partner, and what they prefer to do when they make typos. They were also asked to share screenshots of typos where they misspelled a word. The results indicated that women had a higher rate of correcting typos than men, which supported our hypothesis; however, the difference was not substantial enough to make a conclusion. We did find, however, that intimacy levels had a much stronger correlation with typo correction likelihood. Thus, the main finding of our study is that intimacy is the best factor in predicting whether the person corrects or leaves typos in relationship-based text messaging, not gender.

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