Carrie Underwood, You’re Not Alone: 1 in 25 Have Broken Up via Text Message

Today the tabloids are abuzz with the news that Carrie Underwood broke off her relationship with actor Chace Crawford via text message.

Not so unusual, says a new Wirefly survey.

Today Wirefly released the results of a survey on consumer text messaging, in which 1 in every 25 cell phone users say they have broken off a romance via text message.

And that wasn’t the only surprising result of our survey. This project was designed to take a closer look at consumers’ text messaging habits; we asked people a series of related questions over a month-long span, and actually managed to shatter some common misconceptions. For starters, we assumed people used text messaging for brief, choppy communication full of abbreviations and emoticons. Not so, says the survey data.

We actually found that 35% of respondents typically send lengthy texts of “several sentences.” That beat out the other options, “one word” (4%), “several words” (33%), and “one sentence” (28%), and seems to indicate that text messagers may be more literate than previously thought…

For more on these results, plus additional data that digs further into the motivations for text messaging, click through for the full Wirefly press release.

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