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Research papers on Online dating

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  1. Relationship experiences of transgender and non-binary adults: Exploring dating goals, relationship structures, minority stress, sexual fetishization, and relationship victimization

    Jazmine Perez, C. Pepping · 2024 · International Journal of Transgender Health · 23 citations

    Abstract Objective Here we investigate the relationship experiences of TNB individuals, with a particular focus on (1) relationship status and structure; (2) dating motivations and dating app use; (3) minority stress in relational contexts, including rates and experiences of fetishization, and minority stress-related difficulties in relationship formation and maintenance; (4) rates of relationship violence, victimization, and online harassment; and (5) relationship outcomes, namely sexual and relationship satisfaction. Method 316 TNB adults (M age = 26.84 years, SD = 7.47) completed a survey to assess their relationship experiences. Results Just over half the sample was in a romantic relatio

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  2. Exploring online dating and customer relationship management

    Alan D. Smith · 2005 · Online Information Review · 22 citations

    Purpose: To explore and add insight to the online‐dating services phenomena which is the next product and beneficiary of the internet revolution that offers customers a convenient and affordable alternate to traditional methods of dating. Design/methodology/approach: Empirically investigated through conceptual models and statistical methods was the value proposition of online matchmaking services, which boils down to the ability to provide appropriate matches through successfully business‐to‐customer (B2C) customer service enhanced by the web and based on sound customer relations management practices. Findings: The differentiation of the marketplace includes unique ways to collect user‐based

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  3. Online Dating Is Shifting Educational Inequalities in Marriage Formation in Germany

    Gina Potarca · 2021 · Demography · 18 citations

    Digital technologies govern a large part of our social lives, including the pursuit of a romantic partner. Despite recent inquiries into the social consequences of meeting online, what remains unclear is how the link between education and union formation varies in online versus offline meeting contexts, particularly on the backdrop of growing educational gaps in marriage. Using 2008–2019 pairfam data from Germany (N = 3,561), this study ran a series of Fine-Gray competing risks models to assess how online dating shapes the transition to marriage for partnered adults with nontertiary and tertiary education. Results reveal that irrespective of education, men in online-formed couples had greate

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  4. Online Dating and Mental Health among Young Sexual Minority Black Men: Is Ethnic Identity Protective in the Face of Sexual Racism?

    Ryan M. Wade, Matthew M Pear · 2022 · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · 16 citations

    Racialized Sexual Discrimination (RSD), also known as ‘sexual racism,’ is pervasive within online dating venues. RSD is associated with poor mental health outcomes among young sexual minority Black men (YSMBM), and there is limited research on factors that may mitigate this association. Ethnic identity has been identified as a potential protective factor for racial/ethnic minorities who encounter racialized stressors, though some evidence suggests that ethnic identity may also intensify the negative effects of racial discrimination. Using data from a cross-sectional web-survey of YSMBM (n = 690), a series of linear regression models were estimated to examine the moderating effect of ethnic i

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  6. From Assortative to Ashortative Coupling: Men's Height, Height Heterogamy, and Relationship Dynamics in the United States

    A. Weitzman, D. Conley · 2014 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 13 citations

    Studies of online dating suggest that physical attraction is a key factor in early relationship formation, but say little about the role of attractiveness in longer-term relationships. Meanwhile, assortative coupling and exchange models widely employed in demographic research overlook the powerful sorting function of initial and sustained physical attraction. This article observes the effects of one physical characteristic of men--height--on various relationship outcomes in longer-term relationships, including spouses' attributes, marriage entry and stability, and the division of household labor. Drawing on two different cohorts from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors show that

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  7. Algorithm awareness in online dating: associations with mate-searching difficulty and future expectancies among U.S. online daters

    Jun-Wen M. Hu, Emily S. Zhan · 2024 · Behaviour & Information Technology · 10 citations

    ABSTRACT Prior research has produced contradictory findings regarding online daters’ potential to navigate the algorithmic systems to find compatible matches. Drawing upon a structuration algorithm media effects model, we examine whether online daters with a higher level of algorithm awareness experience less online mate-searching difficulty and report more optimism and hope after using online dating services. Analysing data from a national representative sample of American online daters (N = 871), we found that, in general, algorithm awareness was negatively related to mate-searching difficulty, which was negatively related to optimism but not hope. In addition, the relationship between alg

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  9. Types of Male Adolescent Violence Against Women in Three Contexts: Dating Violence Offline, Dating Violence Online, and Sexual Harassment Online Outside a Relationship

    María José Díaz-Aguado, Rosario Martínez-Arias · 2022 · Frontiers in Psychology · 7 citations

    There has been little investigation of male adolescent violence against women as acknowledged by boys themselves, and even less on such violence in different contexts with comparative studies of behavior between those who perpetrate this violence and the population at large. This study used cluster analysis to establish a male adolescent typology based on boys’ self-reporting of violence against women in three contexts. The participants were 3,132 Spanish teenage boys aged 14–18 with experience of relationships with girls. Three discrete, identifiable types were obtained: the first group (69.8%), ofnon-violentboys; the second group (26%), more involved insexual harassment onlineoutside a rel

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  10. Intimacy in the App Age

    A. Rochadiat, Stephanie Tom Tong, E. F. Corriero · 2020 · 5 citations

    The increasingly connected world calls into question how the mobile technology that is relied on for so many daily tasks also transforms how people meet romantic partners, interact with them, and decide whether to establish or forgo relationships. This chapter explores how romantic relationship processes and outcomes are simultaneously altered, supported, and facilitated by applications native to mobile devices. The authors begin with a description of mobile dating, highlighting the features and affordances characteristic to mobile dating applications, as opposed to online dating. They then examine how individuals use mobile communication technology in the relational initiation phase: (1) go

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  11. Listening and responsiveness in getting-acquainted processes.

    S. Sprecher · 2023 · Current opinion in psychology · 4 citations

    Listening and being responsive to another's turns at disclosure are essential processes that occur at all stages of a relationship, including and perhaps particularly at the formation stage. This article discusses research on the role of responsiveness and listening in contributing to positive outcomes from getting-acquainted interactions. Integral to listening and responsiveness in the getting-acquainted process is asking questions, which is also discussed in this article. Because getting-acquainted interactions can occur in different communication modalities and also with artificial intelligence (AI), variation in the degree to which listening and responsiveness occur as a function of the

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  12. Does Online Dating Challenge Gendered Divisions of Household Labor?

    Gina Potarca, Jennifer L. Hook · 2023 · Social Forces · 4 citations

    Abstract:Online dating has modified how people find and select partners. In addition to outcomes already observed (e.g., exogamy), we argue that by subverting normative dating scripts, online courtship practices may set the course for partnerships that display more egalitarian divisions of routine household labor. This may be particularly true for the married and for lower-educated women, who generally report the least egalitarian allocation of domestic work. Furthermore, we posit that the relationship between meeting context and household labor will be partially explained by the selectivity of those who search for partners online but also by mechanisms specific to online dating that allow f

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  13. Dating across and hooking 'up': Status and relationship formation at an elite liberal arts university

    K. Kilanski, David McClendon · 2017 · Demographic Research · 4 citations

    BACKGROUND Demographic research on assortative mating underplays the role of social status in shaping partnering behavior, yet qualitative research suggests social status is critical in shaping partner desirability and structuring opportunities for partners to meet. OBJECTIVE This study investigates how social status of sororities and fraternities shapes relationship formation between women and men on a college campus. METHODS We draw on data from an online survey of sorority women at an elite liberal arts university about their romantic and sexual lives. RESULTS While status homophily is the dominant pattern in romantic relationships (dating ‘across’), sorority women up and down the status

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  14. Virtual speed dating: Utilizing online‐meeting platforms to study initial attraction and relationship formation

    Juliana E. French, Lindsay J. Bolton, Andrea L. Meltzer · 2024 · Personal Relationships · 3 citations

    There is still much to learn about attraction and relationship formation. Here, we introduce an innovative method that utilizes modern technology to permit large‐scale, observational study of dyadic behavior that may yield new empirical insights into how people choose partners and form relationships: virtual speed dating. In doing so, we provide a methodological overview of a recent virtual speed‐dating study that we conducted, and we provide guidance for other scholars who wish to conduct such a study. Not only does virtual speed dating permit a feasible way to conduct large‐scale speed‐dating research and observe dyadic behavior during initial meeting and dating interactions, but it can be

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  15. The efficiency paradox: A temporal lens into online dating among Chinese immigrants in Canada

    Man-Lin Cai, Yue Qian, Yang Hu · 2025 · Journal of Social and Personal Relationships · 2 citations

    Online dating is widely assumed to enhance the overall efficiency of relationship formation through expanding the pool of potential partners. Yet little is known about how this presumed efficiency plays out beyond the initial search stage. Although temporal compression (i.e., saving time) is considered central to the notion of efficiency, individuals’ lived realities of time and efficiency in online dating remain understudied. Adopting a grounded theory approach to analyzing 31 in-depth interviews with heterosexual Chinese immigrant online daters in Canada, we reveal how time-related expectations and experiences shaped their perceptions of (in)efficiency throughout different stages of online

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  16. Automatic identification of writers’ intentions: Comparing different methods for predicting relationship goals in online dating profile texts

    C. van der Lee, Tess van der Zanden, E. Krahmer, et al. · 2019 · 2 citations

    Psychologically motivated, lexicon-based text analysis methods such as LIWC (Pennebaker et al., 2015) have been criticized by computational linguists for their lack of adaptability, but they have not often been systematically compared with either human evaluations or machine learning approaches. The goal of the current study was to assess the effectiveness and predictive ability of LIWC on a relationship goal classification task. In this paper, we compared the outcomes of (1) LIWC, (2) machine learning, and (3) a human baseline. A newly collected corpus of online dating profile texts (a genre not explored before in the ACL anthology) was used, accompanied by the profile writers’ self-selecte

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  17. Dating-Apps im intersubjektiven Geschehen: Tinder, Grindr und Co. als Optionen der Beziehungsinitiierung

    Matthias Völcker, Sascha Landeck, Katharina Poltze, et al. · 2020 · Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung · 2 citations

    Wir beschäftigen uns in diesem Aufsatz mit Phänomenen netzgängiger Beziehungsinitiierung und der Relevanz von Dating-Apps im intersubjektiven Geschehen. Neben der skizzenhaften Aufarbeitung eines komplexen und ambivalenten Forschungsstandes stellen wir die Ergebnisse einer Interviewstudie mit Nutzer*innen solcher Apps vor. In der Auswertung des empirischen Materials, welches wir mithilfe der Grounded-Theory-Methodologie (GTM) realisierten, eröffnen wir Einblicke in technologisch vermittelte kommunikative Prozesse und arbeiten die (inter-)subjektive(n) Bedeutsamkeit(en) solcher Apps heraus.

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  18. Dating Application Use and Its Relationship with Mental Health Outcomes Among Men Who Have Sex with Men in Urban Areas of Thailand: A Nationwide Online Cross-Sectional Survey

    Sarawut Nasahwan, Jadsada Kunno, Parichat Ong-artborirak · 2025 · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · 1 citations

    Dating applications (DAs) are widely used to establish social and sexual connections among men who have sex with men (MSM), particularly in urban areas. In this study, we aimed to examine the associations between DA use and mental health among Thai MSM. An online cross-sectional survey was completed by 442 MSM residing in Bangkok and urban municipalities across all regions of Thailand. Psychological distress (PD) and probable depression were assessed using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), respectively. Of the participants, 62.7% were current users, with 33.2% experiencing PD and 33.9% having depression. A logistic regression analysis sho

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  19. The impacts of media richness, blurriness, and beautification of online dating profile visual elements on dating outcomes

    Minhao Dai, Shilin Xia · 2025 · Frontiers in Communication · 1 citations

    Introduction: Online dating is a popular way for individuals to connect today, and the visual elements of an online dating profile have become an essential part of online dating. The current study examined how media richness, visual blurriness, and beautification of an online dating profile’s visual elements would influence online dating outcomes. Methods: We conducted an online dating experiment with 10 different conditions with younger adults between 18 and 35 (n = 389). Results: The results showed that the richer visual elements and the beautified selfie in an online dating profile predicted a number of dating outcomes, including stronger perceived positive traits, more favorable profile

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  20. A Study of the Relationship Between Workplace Violence and Online Dating

    Youngkeun Choi · 2022 · International Journal of e-Collaboration · 1 citations

    The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of organizational politics on employees’ online dating behavior and how it influences their job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior. And this study explores if the leader-member exchange can moderate the relationship between organizational politics and online dating behavior. For this, it collected data from 305 employees in Korean companies through a survey method and uses SPSS 18.0 for hierarchical regression analysis for the hypothesis test. In the results, first, organizational politics increases online dating behavior. Second, online dating behavior decreases each relevant factor of job satisfaction and organization

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  21. The pursuit of happiness: a multinational exploration into the effects and outcomes of online dating

    Calli Tzani, Maria Ioannou, J. Synnott, et al. · 2025 · Mental Health and Social Inclusion

    Purpose This study investigates the effects of online dating platforms on users’ wellbeing and the success rates of forming relationships through these services. Given the ongoing debate surrounding the impact of online dating, this study aims to provide empirical insights into its outcomes. Design/methodology/approach This study used a sample of 618 participants from four countries (Croatia, Greece, Italy and Malta) to gain a comprehensive perspective on online dating experiences. Data was collected to assess both the impact on wellbeing and the likelihood of forming relationships through these platforms. Findings The results indicated that using online dating platforms did not signifi

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  22. The Gamification of Online Dating

    Emma Taylor · 2025 · DigitCult - Scientific Journal on Digital Cultures

    The rise of online dating platforms has transformed the way individuals approach romantic relationships, with many users increasingly engaging in these platforms as a form of entertainment in addition to finding meaningful connections. Central to this shift is the growing phenomenon of gamification, the incorporation of game-like elements, into non-game contexts. This article proposes to explore the gamification of online dating, examining how these game mechanics shape user behaviours, influence romantic choices, and impact relationship outcomes. By analysing the ways in which dating platforms integrate game-inspired features, this study will also assess the implications of gamified experie

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  23. Online dating adoption and use: Differences between lesbian/gay, bisexual, and heterosexual adults

    Manuel C. F. Pontes, A. Rynarzewska, Kristine Johnson, et al. · 2025 · First Monday

    The major purpose of this research is to investigate whether bisexual adults differ from lesbian/gay adults in their adoption of online dating. Bisexuality is becoming increasingly common; younger adults are very much more likely to identify as bisexual. There does not appear to be any research that investigated differences between lesbian/gay and bisexual adults on relationship search and online dating. Results show that 1) bisexual adults are significantly less likely than lesbian/gay adults to adopt online dating and 2) bisexual adults are significantly more likely than straight adults to use online dating. Online dating offers the promise of helping bisexual adults make better matches. F

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  24. “I don’t need validation. I have a mirror, and i know myself”: Unravelling the tapestry of online dating experiences and self-construction in queer women

    Sienna Crawford, M. Phillips, S. Devenport · 2026 · Current Psychology

    Online dating has become central to modern relationship formation, yet research has predominantly focused on heterosexual users. Queer women’s experiences remain underexplored despite their unique navigation of heteronormative platforms and multiple intersecting identity categories. Understanding how queer women construct and negotiate identity within digital dating spaces has important implications for psychological scholarship on identity development, digital self-presentation, and sexual minority mental health. We explored how Australian queer women navigated dating apps in terms of self-construction and self-conceptualisation, contexts that inherently shape identity through profile const

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