One last survey from Theresa! I’ll let her take over here:
Dear Mike D Readers,
First: A huge THANK YOU for those of you who have participated in our research so far. These are publishable research projects, meaning your responses are a real and important contribution to psychological science. We cannot do research without volunteers like you. Thank you.
We are still collecting data on both of the previously posted studies, including the most recent on sexual and emotional jealousy, http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TM8YP65. Our data collection will continue for a short while longer, after which we will analyze our data and I’ll post a summary of the results. These will likely be posted in April. Should we publish our findings, I will certainly let you all know. Thank you again.
As a final study of interest (for at least the short while!), here is another opportunity to contribute to science!
ATTENTION DOG OWNERS: Are you interested in the psychology of pet ownership? This is a special invitation to those dog-owning readers of Mike D’s website. I’m supervising a student research project that investigates relationship processes and how people feel about their pet dogs. So we are inviting people like you – who have a pet dog – to take the survey. We want useful, generalizable results, so my student is trying to recruit a sample of adult people who own dogs (since this is tough with a college-aged crowd). If you have 10 minutes and feel like filling out a survey, we’d appreciate it! The survey asks questions about your beliefs about relationships in general and feelings about your pet, and all responses are confidential and anonymous. The study takes less than 10 minutes.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6CQJ3XD
Again, big thanks to those of you who are up for helping our research! Will share the results as soon as they become available.
– Theresa
All responses are anonymous and confidential. You must be at least 18 to participate. This study is a Loyola University Maryland Research Study that has been approved by Loyola’s Institutional Review Board.
I filled out the dog survey. Very interested in the results!
– Amanda (WPI Alum, long time blog reader, first time commenter)
Welcome to the commenting community Amanda!
Dear Readers, here are the long-awaited results:
This study examined pet ownership as a way to counter loneliness. We measured people’s attachments to their pet dogs, as well as their general level of human social support and human attachments. As expected, the more anxious individuals felt in their human relationships, the more lonely they tended to feel. We found a trend in the right direction that people who were more anxious in their human relationships also were more attached to their pets, but this was not a significant correlation. The more people tended to like their pet’s behaviors, the more satisfied they were with their pet, and the more attached to the pet they were.
We used regression analyses to predict pet attachment from both dating status and the extent to which people took care of their pets. The overall model was significant. The extent to which people took care of their pet predicted attachment, but more importantly for our hypotheses: dating status independently predicted attachment to pet: people in less committed relationships tended to be more attached to their pets.