Research On The Relationship Between Email Usage And Satisfaction Of Interpersonal Relationship Among College Students

The society has come into a period of rapidly development of IT. Former studies have shown that, long using of Internet will cause the changing of intercourse, such as indulging in Internet, less and less of face to face interaction and exchanging of letters, so that people fall into the bad relationship. But there also have the studies on the other contrary reporting that, because of Internet, interpersonal interaction has became easier than ever, especially when people make friends with strangers, which make them feel better.Therefore, this paper began with an investigation among the college students to find whether their satisfaction to the relationship has changed after they use email to contact others. Basing on the different study methods as interviewing, questionnaire and experiment, the subjects analyzed the dates collected from the male and female college students of different majors, different grades and different universities (the size of testees' sample is 635) with different statistical ways as the reliability and validity of the self-developed scales, also methods of variance analysis, correlation, EFA, CFA, regression, SEM etc.Major findings are as follows:(1) Questionnaires of interpersonal interaction behavior of college students can be put into use, also does the questionnaires of attitude towards intercourse on Internet. (2) College students' ordinary frequency of email usage is about once time per week, and the email usage frequency of high grades such as Junior and Senior is markedly higher than the low grade as Freshmen and Sophomore. Almost of high frequency of email usage belongs to the male students. There is no distinctive difference of email usage of majors. (3) There have five main intercourse behavior types, such as, being fond of making friends with strangers on Internet, being fond of making friends with new friendsboth on Internet and off Internet, being fond of making old friends off Internet, being fond of making friends with old and new friends on Internet and being fond of contacting with old friends on Internet. (4) Relationship satisfaction with different people ranks differently, from the most satisfaction to the lest, with sisters and brothers, parents, classmates, teachers, non-classmates. Also, there's a remarkable difference after using emailo Though satisfaction of relationship with parents or with sisters and brothers is still high, it has fallen (P=. 004) ; the satisfaction of the relationship with teachers has remarkable improved and ranks the third (P=. 029); non-classmates, from last to the fourth (P=. 004); While of the classmates, last. Satisfaction of relationship will increase with more and more usage of email. (5) The most influent factor of satisfaction of relationship(RS) is interpersonal interaction behavior (IB), email usage will influence RS though influencing IB. (6)The results of experiment say that college students are inclined to answer letters but email. The response time of email ranges from 71 minutes to 37 days, as to the response time to letters, from 2 days to 40 days, usually from 8 days to 14 days. The answer in the letters shows much more straight-out than in email, and people are much more likely to make further touching after intercourse of letters. What' s more, the college students show much more mistrustful to the news in email than in letter.