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2. Fraction of younger, older, and same aged targets first contacted by gender. Note: Fractions calculated for users and, subsequently, aggregated by gender and age group; obs. = as observed; exp.= as expected statistically if users would contact targets randomly by age. Similar age = age discrepancy is two years or less; older = target is 3 or more years older than initiator; younger; target is 3 or more years younger than initiator. n=10,427 users and m=115.909 first contact messages. Data retrieved from a German online dating site in 2007 (for detailed description of the data see Skopek, Schmitz, et al., 2011).
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Online dating - once being a niche - has become a significant social-digital technology and a major venue for couple formation today. While some social research has been busy with understanding the individual and societal impact of online dating, other research sought to exploit ‘big data’ generated through the process of online dating usage to gai...
Citations
... New opportunities to study micro-level processes of how individuals search for mates, what characteristics they look for, and how they interact with potential partners may also emerge given new data from online dating (Skopek 2023). The emergence of dating websites and apps has radically changed how people find partners in recent years (Rosenfeld 2018). ...
... Other studies for the U.S. and Germany demonstrate that educational homogamy is lower via online platforms than via other intermediaries such as schools and friends (Potarca 2017;Thomas 2020). As the search processes and interaction behaviour of individuals in online dating are (often) collected and tracked without the user's awareness, these data offer new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of assortative mating (Skopek 2023). However, a major drawback (besides the general "big data" issues such as representativeness) is that online dating data is private and generally kept under lock and key by the providers, making it difficult for social scientists to gain access to this data (Lichter/Qian 2019;Skopek 2023). ...
... As the search processes and interaction behaviour of individuals in online dating are (often) collected and tracked without the user's awareness, these data offer new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of assortative mating (Skopek 2023). However, a major drawback (besides the general "big data" issues such as representativeness) is that online dating data is private and generally kept under lock and key by the providers, making it difficult for social scientists to gain access to this data (Lichter/Qian 2019;Skopek 2023). In the future, increased and trusted collaboration between platform operators and researchers is needed to gain access to this valuable data on homogamy (Skopek 2023). ...
Recent decades have seen major changes in the educational profiles of the populations of Western industrialised countries, notably a sharp rise in educational attainment and a reversal of the gender gap in education. These trends are likely to have affected patterns of educational assortative mating and its consequences. In this editorial, we first review the empirical evidence on educational assortative mating patterns over the last two decades. Specifically, we examine whether educational homogamy has increased among the highly educated, whether women are now less likely to marry upward across cohorts, and whether the rates of relative educational homogamy in populations have increased. We also examine the factors that explain trends and cross-country differences in educational homogamy. Second, we review the consequences of educational homogamy for several important social outcomes, in particular partnership stability and union dissolution, fertility, and children’s educational attainment. Is educational homogamy increasingly affecting these outcomes, and if so, in what ways and why? Third, we identify research gaps regarding educational assortative mating and its consequences. The six empirical studies in this special issue attempt to fill some of these gaps. We briefly outline these studies and their main findings and point to implications for future research. * This editorial has been peer reviewed.
