Email 2
percent of college students report checking email at least once a day, and 26% report using
instant messaging on a typical day (Pew Internet, 2002a).
Secondly, college is a time when many individuals leave friends and family behind to
attend college far from home, potentially rendering many important relationships long distance.
Tognoli (2003) found that students whose families were long distance reported more
homesickness than those whose families were geographically close. These feelings of loneliness
are related to depression (Beck & Young, 1978) and college attrition (Hawken, Duran, & Kelly,
1991). Depression can have serious consequences for college students, as suicides are “fifty
percent more frequent among college students than among nonstudents of the same age” (Beck
& Young, 1978, p. 80). Staying in contact through email and phone calls can combat
homesickness (Tognoli, 2003). The cheap, convenient channel of email may provide students
with more opportunities to maintain and receive support from even long distance family, friends,
and romantic partners. In fact, Pew Internet (2002a) claim that current college students are more
likely to maintain contact with high school friends because of new communication technologies,
resulting in their having greater numbers of social ties than their parents. Therefore, examining
email among college students helps us to explore how the Internet is affecting college students
emotionally and socially, an area in need of further research (Pew Internet, 2002a).
Relational Maintenance and Email
The first way that this study contributes to the literature on CMC and interpersonal
communication is that by examining the use of email in long distance interpersonal relationships
it questions assumptions about relational maintenance. Ninety-two percent of individuals report
they utilize email, making it the “dominant single activity on the Internet” (Pew Internet, 2002b,
p. 18). However, most scholarly work on relational maintenance has assumed that maintaining
relationships is mainly done face-to-face, without the use of technology (Stafford et al., 1999).
Convention