By examining mobile dating, scholars can explore how people facilitate mediated interpersonal Traditional online dating sites became a societal dating convention, desensitizing stigmas (e.g., Finkel, Google Scholar.
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With respect to previous literature, our results are generally consistent with Donn and Sherman's findings that the younger undergraduate students in their sample were less likely than the older graduate students who participated in their study to report having used the Internet to meet potential partners. Our results extend Donn and Sherman's findings, however, because few participants in their study had ever visited an online dating site whereas our participants all had at least some exposure to such sites, the majority having accessed such sites for purposes of both posting and responding to personals ads.
Interestingly, despite consistent if rather weak evidence that the amount of time participants spent engaged in activities related to online dating increased with age, age and total time online were not related. This pattern of results—and the positive and significant albeit small correlation between age and the ratio of time engaged in online dating activity to total time online—suggests that the older adults in our sample focused proportionally more of their time online on efforts to establish romance than did their younger counterparts.
Such a pattern is again consistent with our claim, based on Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, that older participants may have been more serious in their pursuit of online romance than younger participants. Our second research question examined the association between age and participants' satisfaction with non-Internet methods of meeting people and was based on the assumption, tested as Hypothesis 4, that people experience a narrowing of opportunities for meeting people as they age. Guided by this assumption, we predicted that age and satisfaction with offline means of meeting people would be negatively correlated H3.
Congruent with both hypotheses, we found a fairly robust and negative correlation between satisfaction and age and some albeit fairly weak evidence that reported use of the various offline methods for meeting people examined in this study decreased with age. Specifically, older participants were significantly less likely than younger participants to report meeting people at bars and nightclubs and through their friends. Age was also negatively correlated with the total number of offline methods participants reported using to meet people.
The most interesting exception to this general trend although the correlation was small was the finding that older participants were more likely than younger participants to report using print personals ads. Importantly, this latter finding provides further support for our argument, used to advance Hypothesis 2, that older adults find it more difficult to meet people through conventional offline means and thus turn to less conventional means—such as the Internet and print personals—to enhance their odds of meeting new people.
Interestingly, however, this pattern did not extend to use of either dating services or attendance at singles events. We are unaware of any research that examines either of the hypotheses tested here. Clearly, these are issues that would benefit from further investigation. It remains to be determined, for example, whether the dissatisfaction and decreased use of the means observed here reflects perceptions of their ineffectiveness, diminishing access Hitsch, et al. Future research might explore people's repertoires of methods for finding partners in more depth with an eye toward understanding how changing life contexts and advances in technology influence the breadth of these repertoires and people's utilization of the various means within them.
Our final research question investigated the association between age and participants' perceptions of the degree of stigma associated with meeting people online. Hypothesis 5 predicted that participants would be less likely to report having told friends and family that they use the Internet to meet people the older they are; Hypothesis 6 predicted the reverse. Neither hypothesis was supported. More importantly, the association between age and participants' disclosure status was small and nonsignificant and participants' ratings of their audiences' reactions to disclosure did not vary with age.
The reasonably high rates of disclosure observed here are consistent with Madden and Lenhart's conclusions about stigma based on the Pew survey. Wildermuth goes even further to suggest that the stigma prevalent in the media is manifest in the scholarly literature, as well.
Moreover, both authors discuss stereotypes characterizing online daters as nerdy, desperate, shy, and sex-crazed Anderson, and bored, lonely, socially anxious, weird, nuts, and insane Wildermuth, We can think of at least two explanations for our finding that age was unrelated to whether or not participants had disclosed to family and friends.
First, and supported by the relatively high rates of disclosure observed in this study, Madden and Lenhart's assessment of the degree of stigma that society currently attaches to online dating may be more accurate than views reported in the research literature as exemplified by Anderson and Wildermuth , If the public's attitudes toward online dating have indeed shifted in a more positive and accepting direction, then we would not necessarily expect disclosure to vary with age.
Alternatively, insofar as participants or some participants continue to attach stigma to online dating, the assumptions underlying both our hypotheses may be true such that any differences between older and younger participants may cancel each other out. If both cohorts have reasons albeit different reasons to view turning to the Internet to find romantic partners as deviant, the lack of an association between age and disclosure status would be understandable, even predictable.
As for the lack of association between age and mean rated favorability of the target audiences' response, this finding indicates that, whatever participants may have believed to be true concerning the stigma they would experience were they to share their involvement in online dating with others, those others' reactions did not vary with the age of the participant. Again, this may suggest that Madden and Lenhart's conclusions about societal views of online dating more accurately represent people's real attitudes toward finding romance on the Internet than do the conclusions of scholars such as Anderson and Wildermuth , such that—for persons of any age—online daters are no longer viewed in the pejorative terms they once were.
Alternatively, perhaps both younger and older persons experience real stigma but the reasons for this stigma vary, resulting in reactions from others that are more similar across age than different. Future research will be necessary to tease these explanations apart. Although we think it makes sense to assume that individuals would seek to conceal their involvement in online dating to the extent that they associated stigma with this behavior, it is also important to note that they might also choose to conceal the fact that they use the Internet to meet people for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with perceiving online dating as a stigmatized behavior.
Thus, our disclosure measure is at best a proxy for stigma, its validity unknown at this time.
Further research with more direct measures of perceived stigma such as the items Anderson, , used is necessary to determine with greater certainty whether and how age and perceived stigma may be associated. Our results are suggestive of the possibility that, at least among those who actively engage in online dating, the perceived stigma associated with online dating may be rather low.
We do not know, however, how different our results might have been had we asked participants directly to rate the degree to which stigma is attached to online dating. Four limitations of this study deserve mention. First, our sample comprised self-selected Internet users who found our study online and completed it in the absence of extrinsic reward.
Our participants may thus differ from the broader population of online daters in important ways. For example, those who participated in our study may be relatively more invested in the pursuit of romance via the Internet or have had more favorable experiences with online dating than those who would not participate without an incentive. Certainly, such differences may have biased our findings in ways we can neither measure nor control.
Nevertheless, we believe that our sample more closely resembles the North American online dating population than samples recruited directly from educational settings e. To the extent that universities and colleges serve as natural social institutions and thereby promote opportunities for contact between potential partners Hitsch et. Our sample is also highly educated, mostly white, and spends a higher than average amount of time per week online as compared to the We must be cautious, therefore, in generalizing our findings beyond the present sample. It is possible that age might be more or less important to understanding the online dating experiences of people of color, those who have less education, and those who spend less time on the Internet.
Future research examining age in relation to people's attitudes toward, involvement in, and experiences with Internet romance would benefit from efforts to obtain more diverse samples and from more focused examinations of the broader socioeconomic contexts in which their samples are located. Given the number of partial submissions and the amount of missing data in our data set, our survey also appears to have taxed respondents' attention spans.
Unfortunately, we cannot know how our findings might have differed had more participants completed our survey in full. Researchers might be wise to limit the length of the surveys they construct when conducting online research in this area cf. Finally, we investigated individuals' involvement in and experiences with online dating and Internet personals ads at a single point in time during a particular historical era.
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The age effects we observed might thus reflect cohort effects restricted in their applicability to the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries. Of course, our predictions were to an important extent grounded in the premise that today's adults belong to two cohorts: These limitations notwithstanding, we think our findings have important implications for research on online dating and Internet romance.
The effects we obtained were generally quite small in magnitude, but they were nevertheless sufficiently consistent in direction and observed across a sufficiently wide array of variables to suggest that age may be a variable of some importance in understanding how romantic relationships are established online. To the extent that future research corroborates or extends our findings and especially if the trend of growing Internet use among older cohorts continues Center for The Digital Future, , it will be important for investigators to take care in recruiting participants.
Scholars have argued that shifting demographic trends have encouraged the evolution and growth of new ways of initiating romantic relationships e. The present study explored the possibility that people's involvement in and experiences with online dating—the highest profile and most rapidly proliferating of these new techniques—varies with age.
Our findings suggest that age may be an important variable to consider as investigators continue their efforts to map the terrain of relationships established online. We hope that other researchers will incorporate examinations of age in their studies to provide a fuller understanding of when, how, and why age matters when it comes to matters of the heart initiated and enacted online. The authors would like to thank the many undergraduate students who offered assistance with the design of this study and Candace Konnert for assistance with the preparation of this manuscript.
Barrie Gunter
His research interests focus on the interface between technology and the ways people meet and become attracted to one another. Boon is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on close relationships, broadly defined, with a particular emphasis on the dynamics of dating relationships. Her research interests focus on both implicit and explicit social and relationship cognition.
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Study of Online Relationships and Dating - Oxford Handbooks
On Age and the Advantages of Technology. Life Before the Internet. As one reviewer suggested, compared to those without such experience, those who have experienced the dissolution of a committed, long-term relationship may be more cautious in their approach to online dating and less enthusiastic about the opportunities it may afford. We examined age as a continuous variable to maximize the power of our analyses, avoid problems associated with unequal n among groups, and because any cut-offs used to categorize participants by age would necessarily have been arbitrary.
Ancillary analyses show that the results do not differ substantially if we retain homosexual participants in our sample.