To address the above research questions, we conducted a number of analyses.
First Research Question
To address the first research question which addressed the issue of whether stages could be discerned in the activities of e-daters and whether these stages were different for males and females, descriptive statistics was used to tabulate the activities of the respondents each week. Only activities that the respondents referred to as their “main” activity for the week were tabulated.
Table 1 shows the distribution of the respondents’ main activity each week by gender. As demonstrated in the table, there were observable differences in the activities that males and females engaged in each week during the test period.
Thus, for week 1 the main activity engaged in by the majority of males (70%) and females (100%) was to construct or revise their Match. com profile. In week 2 and 3, half (50%) of the females were still constructing or revising their profile while half (50%) of the males had moved on and were conducting a search for matches.
Interestingly, in week 4, 57% ofthe males were initiating contact with others, an activity that a few of the females (19%) started at the ninth week, and by the eleventh week only half (50%) of the females were initiating contact.
During week 5, most men (and women) were back to re sponding to contacts. In weeks 6 through 9, men were continuing to initiate contact with matches, an activity that women never engaged in over the eleven week period. Indeed, most women in weeks 7 through 10 were engaged in responding to contact from others.
To complete our analysis for the first research question, we used a chi square to explore whether gender (male vs. female) was related to the main activity e-daters engaged in each week. Even though differences were observed in the percentages, only weeks 3 and 8 were significant at the
0. 05 level, and weeks 4, 9, and 10 were significant at the 0.10 level.