Someone Like Me: The Rise of Online Dating and Partner Similarity

• In Event: 1567 - Mate Selection and Relationship Formation

Abstract

With the rise of the internet as a social intermediary, the importance of family, school, and friends have declined for meeting partners. The rise of online dating could transform the matches individuals make, as a broader pool of potential partners might be available. I analyze changes in marital homogamy within market areas using the 2008 to 2015 American Community Survey. To measure interest in online dating, I use the number of searches for leading dating sites, generated by Google Trends. Google Trends data are indices of the relative popularity of a search term on Google. I use logistic regression models with market area fixed effects to control for unobserved differences between market areas. Results show that the rise in online dating is associated with educational homogamy generally, with larger differences in areas with smaller same-education groups. There is no average link with racial homogamy, but in areas with small same-race/ethnicity group sizes, the rise in online dating is associated with increased racial homogamy.

Author

• Sabino Kornrich, Emory University