Does the internet affect assortative mating? Evidence from the U.S. and Germany

Abstract

The Internet has now become a habitual channel for finding a partner, but little is known about the impact of this recent partnership market on mate selection patterns. This study revisits the supply side perspective on assortative mating by exploring the role played by online venues in breeding educational, racial/ethnic and religious endogamy. It compares couples that met online (through either online dating platforms, Internet social networking, Internet gaming website, Internet chat, Internet community, etc.) to those that met through various offline contexts of interaction. Using unique data from the U.S. for the year 2009 and data from Germany collected between 2008 and 2014, I run log-multiplicative models that allow for the strength of partners' association to vary along meeting settings. Results reveal that the Internet promotes weaker couple endogamy compared to conventional contexts typically known to foster endogamy, such as school, family, friends, or religious venues.

Online Exogamy Reconsidered: Estimating the Internet’s Effects on Racial, Educational, Religious, Political and Age Assortative Mating

“…This is also similar to the observed bivariate difference of 7.5% in couples formed since 1996. As reported in previous studies (Potarca 2017;Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012), couples who met online are more likely to be interreligious, 13% more often in simple bivariate terms (Table 3). Controlling for other factors, I estimate online-formed couples to have over 1.8 greater odds of being of different religions (Table 4), or a 12.5% increased probability across observed values of the covariates (p<.01).…”

“…Comparisons with Specific Offline Sources. Table 7 compares couples who met online in any way with those who met through a variety of offline sources without any detectable role of the Internet (similarly to Potarca [2017]). This division of the offline meetings are based on the data authors' coding of the respondent's stories of how they met their partner.…”

“…What we know about the diversity of couples that result from meeting online has so far been very limited. National probability samples that both include data on how couples met and are recent enough to capture the rise of online dating have been very rare: studies using one survey of the U.S. (Potarca 2017;Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012) and one of Germany (Potarca 2017) found mixed results on the impact of the Internet on couple assortativity. Both found that couples who met online had greater odds of being interreligious, but otherwise found that, controlling for other factors, online meetings differed only from specific offline settings that are exceptionally segregated on a social dimension: Potarca (2017:295) found that online dating is related to less educational endogamy than are school-formed romances in both countries, and related to less racial endogamy than meeting through family members in Germany.…”

Age Homophily on a Czech Online Dating Site

“…Za předpokladu, že lidé na osobní úrovni preferují kontakt s partnery, kteří se jim podobají, k nárůstu diverzity docházet nebude. Uživatele, kteří se od nich výrazně liší nebo jiným způsobem nesplňují jejich představy, zkrátka odfiltrují [Potarca 2017].…”

Meeting online and family-related outcomes: evidence from three German cohorts

“…We contribute to the online partnering literature first by considering a wider range of family outcomes than in previous studies, and second by analyzing data from Germany, i.e. providing results that are complementary to the literature, which tends to be focused on the United States (with the significant exceptions of Danielsbacka et al, 2019;Potarca, 2017).…”