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254 CHAPTER 9 Ethnography

RESEARCHING ONLINE DATING
One of the more fascinating topics being addressed by HCI researchers in
recent times is the topic of online dating. Individuals go online to various sites
(such as http://www.eharmony.com), providing photos and descriptions of their
interests in the hopes that they might meet people for dates or relationships.
With millions of subscribers of various ages, these sites represent an interesting
area for HCI research. Although a number of approaches have been used to
study online dating sites, ethnography has not been the primary approach. This
raises an interesting question—can ethnography be applied to online dating?
At first this might seem like a research focus on individuals but online
dating communities are groups with group norms, accepted practices, and
shared group communication tools (such as chat rooms). These online groups
differ primarily from work groups in terms of the goal of the interaction
(dating, not work), the goal of the presentation (to look attractive and
interesting, rather than to present information), and the transient population
of members in the group (people join and leave the online dating community
very rapidly). An example of a group norm and practice is that if you e-mail
someone and they do not respond, it is considered totally inappropriate to
e-mail them a second time.
Hancock et al. (2007) took the approach of recruiting people who
were already involved in online dating, to determine the accuracy of their
online dating profiles. A self-selected group responded to their recruitment
advertisement. The researcher team met with these 80 participants, who
presented copies of their online dating profiles (Hancock et al., 2007).
Participants were asked to rate the accuracy of their profiles with regard
to height, weight, and age. Only 18% of participants had inaccurate age
information in their profile but 48% of participants had inaccurate height
information and 59% of participants had inaccurate weight information in their
online profile. An analysis of the participants' perception of profile accuracy
showed that most participants were aware when their profile information was not
accurate and were aware that this could be potentially deceptive.
Fiore and Donath (2005) examined how people in online dating
communities tend to communicate with other people who have similar interests
and preferences. The researchers were able to broker an agreement with a
dating site to access profiles, statistics, and e-mails (Fiore and Donath, 2005).
It is unclear in the paper if users were aware that their profile information
was shared with researchers, although it is unlikely (since the researchers did
analysis on over 236,000 messages sent from over 29,000 users to over 51,000
users). An analysis of 110,000 conversations (messages between a unique
pair of users), found that 78% were single messages that were not responded
to by the recipient. Users were more likely to contact other users who had
similar characteristics (such as “wants children,” smoking, educational level,