“The realistic view might not provide what the company wants,” she said, “however it’s my responsibility to do so and provide data that is accurate.”<br />It is unclear whether the surveys sampled similar and representative demographics, a fact<br />that Jennifer Lundquist, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst who researches online dating, said indicated that more studies were needed to determine if Tinder’s surveys were accurate.<br />“You are able to have a visual idea of the pool in front of you, whereas the people<br />who aren’t dating online are simply speculating as to what the pool may be like.”<br />The report looked at a survey administered via the app to 7,072 Tinder users, ages 18 to 36,<br />and a second survey of 2,502 offline daters, ages 18 to 35, conducted by Morar Consulting.<br />“One issue with the non-online dating comparison group is<br />that given how normalized and destigmatized online dating has become for this age group, it’s unusual not to participate in online dating,” Professor Lundquist said.<br />(The offline daters fell into three groups: people who have never dated online, people who had dated online in the past<br />but no longer did, and people who had never used online dating but were open to the possibility.)<br />As a result, she said, the offline daters “may be a weirdly skewed group, or as sociologists would say negatively select.”<br />Professor Lundquist also questioned the motivations for the survey, pointing to the anecdotal belief among many daters<br />that Tinder’s picture-based feature leads it to be a “hookup” app rather than a mechanism for finding long-term partners.
