A colleague, Zeynep Tufekci, and I were having a friendly debate about whether college students are using sites focused specifically on online dating or whether they are using Facebook and other more general social networking sites in lieu of online dating sites. I compiled some data from the Pew 2005 online dating survey. As you can see, online dating sites were most popular among young adults. I’ll try to compile the same chart for 2010 next week.
In the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Are college students using online dating more than they were five years ago? Are they using other sites in lieu of online dating sites?
I also pulled a chart from OKCupid’s blog. While I have been critical of some of their policies in the past, they do an admirable job of sharing aggregate data with their users.
We see that the user base of OkCupid fairly closely parallels the 2005 Pew data on online dating use in the overall population.
If you are interested in online dating, I suggest reading the 2010 paper, “The Social Demography of Internet Dating in the United States,” by Jessica M. Sautter, Rebecca M. Tippett, and S. Philip Morgan in Social Science Quarterly and the 2006 Pew “Online Dating” report by Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart.
Comments 2
Ned — October 29, 2010
I've never used Facebook as a dating source. Partially this is because I've been hanging around various incarnations of OkCupid for entirely too long, but also because I don't trust Facebook as a viable source for relationship statuses. Why? Because I never change mine anymore except for the potential fake marriage, so I more or less assume the titles are worthless.
What I do find amusing though is that sometime in the past few years, OKC stopped being something only I and a few friends spoke about sheepishly to being a site that "everyone" seems to use. Even my dad... but she's out of my age bracket so that doesn't count.
nathanjurgenson — October 29, 2010
pj - cool post! you mentioned doing this for 2010 data soon, so i thought of some ideas to take into account when doing so...
first, your data here is all people, not just those attending/have attended college, adjust the research question as such haha
looking at your first chart, i think the trend-line is a bit misleading. the trend-line is boosted up for the youngest users because of the huge spike at around 25/26 years old. at 25/26, most are out of undergraduate education. looking at those 18-23 or so gives you an average use rate the same or less than those all the way up to their 60's.
wonder if there is a big internet-access difference by age that might skew this
last, okcupid's demographics might be very different than other internet dating sites ~nathan