Perceived Miscommunication in Friends’ and Romantic Partners’ Texted Conversations

ABSTRACT

Individuals report that text messages produce a lot of miscommunication when compared to phone calls or face-to-face interactions (Johnson, Bostwick, & Anderson, 2016). However, to date, scholars have not investigated the content of text messages perceived as miscommunication or reasons people believe that they experience miscommunication via texts. In the present study, 295 participants provided actual texting conversations they considered to reflect miscommunication and explained why they considered the conversations to be miscommunication. Findings revealed themes of the miscommunication related to both referential and affective miscommunication as well as four themes pertaining to why miscommunication occurs in texting (interweaving of texting and other activities, lack of nonverbal cues, use of acronyms and punctuation, and technical features and problems).

KEYWORDS:

• Miscommunication
• misunderstanding
• relational communication
• shared meaning
• text messages

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Twenty of the texted interactions could not be categorized as referential or affective miscommunications.