It provides a summary of social psychology study in the perspective of micro investigation, especially in the study of close relationship, such as marriage.

As I am not a social psychologist, instead of digging these relationship studies very much, I prefer to propose some of my opinions or ideas about how to apply these ideas to my own study, especially for online community

First, compared to the interaction between couples, friends and other traditional relationship, the interaction of online users is not face to face and mostly anonymous although they might communicate a lot, so I am wondering whether the traditional definition/measurement of intimacy fits here or not， are they intimate with each other?

Second, gender differences are popularly discussed in the sphere of social psychology, how about in the study of online community. For instance, if the dominant users on one special online community are women, it would be wise for the developers to consider about women users’ special preference, such as color, music preference.

Third, I am curious about the question of how to select a good social psychology topic and how to integrate technique/knowledge from other disciplinary to this sphere which can reach a win-win result? For instance, Paul and Yan found social comparison and social identity theory from social psychology theory, how about us?

In addition, one opinion a little bit far from research is that I don’t think women don’t consider about physic attraction when choosing their husband, or at least their boyfriend. I suspect that it is because they don’t want to confess this fact when they are interviewed, and further, The reason for “Beauty and Beast” exist instead of” Witch and Prince” is because women are easily to get moved by someone who treats her well.

At first I wondered why no one posted anything here, then I took a look at the paper. Obvious, really.

After going through the monumental literature review (twice), I decided that the best thing to do was to offer up one of the ways that I perform "sensemaking" :-) So, here is an outline of the major headings in the paper, for the benefit of others who might want it.

NOTE: Because the "preview" does not match the actual post, I had to insert --'s for indentation (drupal strips them out).

THE STUDY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
----- science of interpersonal relationships
---------- psych contrib
----- social psych and rel scien
---------- contrib of rel sci to soc psych
----- overview
CONCEPT OF RELATIONSHIP
----- close relationships
----- establishing interdependence
---------- correlation between partners' behaviors
---------- sequential analysis
---------- social relations model
----- relationship taxonomies
RELATIONSHIP BEGINNINGS
----- the first encounter
---------- voluntariness of interaction
---------- the social context
----- the concept of attraction
----- principles of attraction in first encounters
---------- familiarity
---------- reciprocity of attraction
---------- similarity
---------- physical attractiveness
--------------- ... and interaction
--------------- determinants of...
----- mate selection
---------- homogamy in...
---------- gender differences in mate preferences
----- theories of relationship development
---------- self-disclosure
---------- intimacy
---------- theories of interpersonal involvement
----- emotion regulation in relationships
---------- evolutionary models
RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION AND STABILITY
----- overview of research on...
----- the sociological approach
----- the clinical approach
---------- interaction behavior and satisfaction
---------- communication
---------- intervention
----- the social psychological approach
---------- interdependence theory
--------------- levinger's cohesiveness model
--------------- johnson's commitment theory
--------------- rusbult's investment model
---------- commitment to the relationship
---------- the relationship's exterior
--------------- goodness of alternatives
--------------- social approval of others
---------- equity and other resource allocation principles
RELATIONSHIPS AND WELL-BEING
----- relationships and happiness
---------- loneliness
--------------- dispositional factors
--------------- social circumstances
--------------- social cognitive tendencies
----- relationships and morbidity and mortality
---------- epidemiological studies
---------- social networks
--------------- network size
--------------- frequency of social contact
--------------- network density
--------------- network configuration
---------- social support
----- toxic relationships
---------- violence in relationships

Basically the paper's investigates two questions:
what is a "relationship"?
what is "close"?
These are crucial in studying online relationships and connectivity in general, including the persistence of online relationships and user choices.

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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser

Thanks for Paul who came up with the summary:)

This piece, although very long, gives us a generalsocial-psychology perspective of looking at people's social relationship. Although it was inteded to talk about closerelationship, the majority of the concepts can be extended to any levels of social interaction: types, how to begin, context, ans properties like stabability....as well as the approaches to examine these relationships.

The old concern that online relationship might be limited to some way has been actually eliminated so far, as people can have interaction online of any levels of closeness. This potentially suggests that many of these social-psychology theories can be adopted into online relationship stidies. However, there might be the need to largely adjust some of them. For example, one of the notable observations is that the measures of the "correlations" might not apply in online communities. Because people can just devote one part of theri social presence into the online communities; and these seperations can be seriously differing. I thought this might be the biggest challenge as well as opportunity for online community study in terms of from the social-psychology perspective.

I read a story recently happend in China. A guy (who actually is from contryside and got only middle school deploma) pretended to be a graduate student from abroad and he chased several girls at the same time and got mone/laptop...from them. One of the girls who later found the truth actually broke up with her ex-boyfriend for this guy, (whom she also got to know from online and they had even planned to marry and bought an apt togther). I was thinking :1) how much the guy got the chance to easily cheat online than ever; 2) how much the girl's former experience lets her even easier to fall in love with this guy.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=7809308&cmd=showd...