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On researching online daters...

Published September 5, 2014 by Mark Bodnar

One of our marketing classes is going to be working on a project involving online dating markets/consumers this term, so I thought I'd make a short list of some key resources and search strategies likely to be helpful for them. For those SFU researchers who aren't in the class involved: You, too, are welcome to try the resources below. Sometimes such focused exploration can help you learn our resources faster than just random browsing. Enjoy! (The resources and tips below are in no particular order -- I'm just listing them as they come to mind.)

1. PsycInfo If you hope to learn about the profile of people who use online dating sites -- personality types, demographics, etc. -- then a database that covers psychology, consumer behaviour, and marketing journals is a good place to start! On a quick look, it appears that a combination of the subject terms Social dating and Internet is a good starter search. (Click HERE for the results of my initial, rough search.) Add terms like personalit* to narrow the results down a bit. (Click HERE for that more focused result list.) As you scan the results, remember that you'll likely be needing articles that help you understand trends among the consumers (secondary research using other people's primary research results), and you'll also be needing to study the methodology (variable definitions, study designs, questionnaire wording?) used in the studies to help you plan your own primary research work. An article that may not have much useful information on the topic may still have useful methodology details that you could learn from! One article in the result list caught my eye as a particularly good starting point. As a relatively recent literature review on the topic, this article's cited references and times cited are amazing resources.

Finkel, E. J., Eastwick, P. W., Karney, B. R., Reis, H. T., & Sprecher, S. (2012). Online dating: A critical analysis from the perspective of psychological science. Psychological Science In The Public Interest, 13(1), 3-66. doi:10.1177/1529100612436522

2. Passport GMID This topic doesn't quite match Passport's usual strengths (fast moving consumer goods), but since Passport does deal with global consumer trends in general, it's still worth trying. Some quick searches for phrases such as "online dating" and "Internet dating" get me reports such as:

What page is love on? Online dating and consumers
Digital Love: The New Online Highways to Romance
Future watch: Consumers caught in the web of internet romance

Not bad, but (again) this isn't really Passport's strength. Let's keep exploring. 3. Ipsos News Centre Our Ipsos public opinion poll results database is a bit hit-or-miss -- it's hard to predict if a specific topic will have been the focus of one of their polls. Again, though, it never hurts to run a fast search! The searching in the Ipsos database is a bit rough. I'll start by using the Advanced option to search in the page titles only and I'll enter just "dating." This gets me a report from a US poll done for Lava-Life back in 2002: "Move Over Single’s Bars, Online Dating Taking Hold" As with all such Ipsos reports, make sure that you look for a link to "Detailed tables" so that you can get the demographic breakdown of the respondents for each question. In this case, they offer details on the age, gender, income, education, marital status, and race of the survey's respondents. Ipsos also has a series of multi-country studies on people's use of social media and the Internet in general. You can get to the reports that have come out of those studies by clicking on Socialogue in the lower left corner within the database. You may need to scan many reports to find some that might be relevant to your topic. For instance, the Socialogue report called "Meet Me Online" from 2012 covers people's opinions regarding socializing online vs. in person. As with the report above, the responses are broken out by gender and age. Even though the specific topic of dating doesn't seem to come up, the results may help you understand your target market. While I'm talking about Ipsos... we have a few more substantial Ipsos reports in our collection, including a couple that touch on the demographics of Canadian's who do things like "Use an online personals/dating/introduction service" Start with:

4. Sociological Abstracts As with PsycInfo, subjects such as Internet and Dating (social) seem to be the most relevant in Sociological Abstracts, but a quick keyword search for just "online dating" may quickly get you to the most relevant results. Click HERE for the results of my exploratory search. Some of the articles seem very useful at a quick glance: good coverage of the ethnic, gender, age, and personality variation in the consumers of such services. 5. IBISWorld Although IBISWorld's reports are more industry focused than market or consumer oriented, they might still be worth a look. Some IBISWorld reports to watch for:

Dating Services in the US - 81299a
Dating Services in Canada - 81299aCA

6. Print Measurement Bureau (PMB) Category Reports The PMB Reports are a bit tricky to use effectively, but I think the effort to learn them will be worth it in this case. If you choose the Demographics reports, then click on the plus sign to expand the options under "Computer/Electronic Devices, Phones & Service Provider," and then on "Internet," you should see that there's an entry for the people who said that "Online Dating" is among the types of sites they had visited in the last 30 days. Clicking on the percentage next to that category will get you a demographic breakdown of the people who reported visiting such sites in the 2014 PMB survey.

OK -- I'll stop for now before I start to get into things like news databases (e.g., Factiva :-) ). Give the above resources a try, then let me know if you still need help. Mark ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mark Bodnar Business Librarian mbodnar@sfu.ca P.S.: Don't forget to check out our Primary and Secondary market research guides to find gems like our Marketing Scales Handbook volumes!