Educational homophily in online dating

Abstract

"The structures of normal marriage markets, e.g., the educational system, and their influence on changes in social equality have by now been fairly well researched. In their comparative international study based on longitudinal data, Blossfeld und Timm (2003) showed that in the course of the expansion in education in all western societies studied there was a clear tendency towards increasing educational homogamy. Blossfeld (2009) provides a current overview on the status of research in this field. With the spread of the Internet as a marriage market, research into choice of partner is being met with new challenges. As the Internet as a medium through which to conduct a targeted search for a partner becomes more differentiated, a new partial marriage market has emerged, one which is seemingly gaining in importance in contrast to traditional marriage contexts, such as the educational system. After all - as the most recent studies show - roughly 5 million people in Germany use such internet-based online dating platforms. What is more, strong turnover growth and favourable forecast trends point to a strong expansion of the market in the coming years (Schulz et al. 2008). At present, scientific findings about the processes of initiating contact and the development of relationships via the Internet are extremely few and far between, especially in the form of mass data. For instance, little research has been conducted into what social structures come about via online dating sites, how these structures come about, and how interrelationships can be explained from a theoretical point of view. The way in which choice of partner via the Internet influences the development of social inequality is a matter of controversy because insufficient empirical evidence is available. While some authors maintain that the Internet has a de-structuring effect, other studies argue that the social structures and contact-barriers derived from characteristics of socio-economic status that are well-known in everyday life are largely reproduced in online dating sites. Proceeding from here, this contribution examines the phenomenon of educational homophily within a large-scale German-language online dating platform. The initial contact and answer behaviour of the actors is reconstructed on the basis of the non-reactive observational data of the members of this platform. The aim of the analyses is to gauge the extent and the determining factors of educationary-homophile contact tendencies in online-dating, as well as to reach initial conclusions about what social mechanisms govern decisions in the choice of partner at the micro level and what consequences these social processes have for the development of social inequality in this partial marriage market and possibly at macroeconomic level." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Schulz, F., Skopek, J. & Blossfeld, H. (2010): Bildungshomophilie im Onlinedating. In: H.- G. Soeffner (Hrsg.) (2010): Unsichere Zeiten: Herausforderungen gesellschaftlicher Transformationen : Verhandlungen des 34. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Jena 2008, p. 1-12.