Study title

World Wide

Individual

Online daters (N=853) and participants recruited from a victim support site (N=397) completed a battery of online questionnaires. Some of the participants were recruited from a large online dating site. Recruitment emails were sent to over 250,000 individuals who had been active on the company’s UK sites for over 38 days. In the period from 21st March to 18th July 2011, 1096 individuals accessed the survey. Of these, 853 completed it fully and indicated that their data could be used for analysis at the end of the questionnaire. Participants were also recruited from a volunteer-run website set up to support romance scam victims. Data were collected using a questionnaire hosted on the Qualtrics online survey platform. The questionnaire comprised a number of scales, represented online using individual or matrix-style layouts with responses entered via radio buttons, drop-down menus or free text entry as appropriate. Progression through the questionnaire was controlled by disabling browser ‘back’ buttons. Respondents were able to leave the questionnaire then return to the same point later. Given occasional concerns about the validity of online psychological tests (e.g. Buchanan, 2007), all the scales chosen had previously been used successfully in online research projects that produced findings consistent with the scales being valid and reliable measures.Personality traits were measured using a five-factor personality inventory validated for use online by Buchanan, Johnson and Goldberg (2005). This 41-item inventory gives measures of Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.Sensation Seeking was measured using the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS; Hoyle, Stephenson, Palmgreen, Lorch & Donohew, 2002). This is a widely used 8-item scale that addresses the same construct as Zuckerman’s ‘gold standard’ measure of sensation seeking, the SSS-V (Zuckerman, Eysenck & Eysenck, 1978). Its brevity makes it more suitable for use online. It has been used successfully in internet-mediated research (e.g., Peter & Valkenburg, 2011, albeit with a reduced item set). While the BSSS can be scored in terms of four subscales, for current purposes only the overall sensation seeking score was calculated.Romantic Beliefs were measured using the scale of that name (Sprecher & Metts, 1989). This comprises 15 items measuring four distinct sets of beliefs (Love finds a way, One and only, Idealization and Love at first sight). It has previously been used in unpublished online research by the present authors (Authors, 2009), and found to have acceptable reliability with an alpha of .86 in an online survey of 8088 members of an online dating site.Loneliness was measured using the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, 1996), a 20-item scale providing a global measure of loneliness. The measure has been administered online in full (Baker & Oswald, 2010) and abbreviated (Hollenbaugh, 2011) versions and shown to be reliable when used in that format. Respondents also completed the Internet Self-Efficacy Scale (Eastin & LaRose, 2000).