Technology and Relationships

Family Relationships

With the advent of Internet communication, a central concern was whether online relationships would have negative implications for off-line family relationships. An early study by Robert Kraut and his colleagues in the late 1990s suggested that those adults who spent more time on the Internet were more socially isolated than were those who spent less time on the Internet. However, this appears to have been only a short-term effect associated with early adopters of the technology because most subsequent research has not replicated these initial findings. In general, researchers have found that Internet use has no relationship with the amount of time spent with family members or the quality of those relationships.

Barry Wellman and his colleagues have begun to take a more in-depth look at how communication technologies are being used by family members. They reported that Internet communications are becoming more common among household members when they are away from each other such as when parents are at work and children are at home. Most of the e-mail communication is between the adults in the household. Although parents mostly use the telephone to stay in contact with their children, parents do report e-mailing their children. Their findings indicate that women are more likely to contact children and use the Internet to maintain family ties, which suggests that women are now using the Internet to perform the social networking role that they have long held in families. Another finding by Wellman is that families tend to share time using a single household computer. Husbands and wives report spending 1 to 3 hours per week using the Internet together, and parents report spending from 2 to 4 hours per week using the Internet with their children. Wellman noted that in contrast to concerns about the computer isolating family members, it appears to bring them together. However, this may be a temporary phenomenon. Most households currently have one computer, but as households obtain multiple computers, these sharing activities may disappear.

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