· File:Elizabeth E. Bruch & Mark Newman ()'s Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets, Fig. blogger.com From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository Jump to · Online self-presentation literature is reviewed and an argument for a rhetorical-epistemological approach to studies of online dating is presented. 30 online daters from a metropolitan region of the Midwestern United States (mostly white, aged 25–35, gender diverse) provided a copy of their online personal advertisement and participated in an interview · Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. Elizabeth E. Bruch1,2, * and. M. E. J. Newman2,3. 1 Department of Sociology and Center for the Study of Cited by: 19
[] Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets
This manuscript compares presentational rhetorics in online personal advertisements to articulated rhetorics generated through interviewing sessions to understand rhetorics of online dating. Online self-presentation literature is reviewed and an argument for a rhetorical-epistemological approach to studies of online dating is presented.
Personal advertisements and interview transcripts were analyzed separately using values coding to consider rhetorical dimensions. Results indicate ethos is a primary concern of online daters and limits what can be stated in online profiles. Discussion explores implications of articulated and presentational rhetorics as well as potential future studies. The commercial trajectory of online dating suggests it will continue to be a popular way of seeking romantic partners.
The same report estimated that 16 million individuals had gone to websites to meet people online. Studies of online dating suggest a great deal of thought and consideration go into identity-construction processes. Online daters are faced with a continuous cycle of self-disclosure that is shaped by how they believe others may see them.
As Heino, Ellison, and Gibbs assert, in many ways online dating turns relationship-building processes into a metaphorical marketplace where interested individuals shop each others' profiles in hope of finding romantic love.
This marketplace metaphor helps to explain why so much of the existing research about online dating focuses on topics such as uncertainty reduction e. Online dating participants are aware that while shopping, they may be dealing with a product that is being sold; aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets that what they are buying relationally may be different from what it seems.
While existing research has built from traditional print personal advertisement studies e. Specifically, this study uses analysis of 30 online personal advertisements and qualitative interviews with the individuals who placed the ads to interrogate rhetorical dimensions of values, beliefs, and attitudes as they are constructed in an online dating environment.
Informed by past research regarding online self-presentation e, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. To begin, previous research examining online self-presentation is reviewed.
The behaviors associated with positive self-presentation are not, as one would expect, unique to online dating interactions. Individuals creating online profiles are afforded asynchronicity and editability in the process Walther, allowing them a comfortable space for constructing rhetorical possibility especially compared to face-to-face interaction.
The same research also demonstrates that those engaging online dating tend to make overattributions based on minimal cues provided by other online daters while also scrutinizing even the most minuscule of details in order to make an assessment about viability Ellison et al. Toma and Hancock found that not only was compensation frequently used in the construction of online personal advertisements, but so was deceptive self-enhancement frequently via online photos and the showcasing of desired attributes one possesses.
Still, given that some research indicates misrepresentation is less likely when individuals have the potential of meeting someone face-to-face at a later date Leary, ; Toma et al. Research about potential deceptions in online personal advertisements e. Up until now, however, such research has not considered rhetorical dimensions of what has been constructed in personal advertisements.
How, specifically, might it work as a suasive force? What might the rhetorical vision be of the person who chose to include it in her or his advertisement? This epistemology offers the potential to explicate new understandings of online dating. Given the rhetorical nature of online dating, this study is grounded in the ongoing scholarly work exploring rhetorics of relationships e, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets.
Epistemologically, studies of online dating have focused almost solely on what is there or what is perceived to be there and not about how people create meaning about what is there or what they want to be there.
Beyond the sense that relationships are rhetorical in aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets public presentations, they are also rhetorical in the sense that publics create social exigencies about what is ideal for them Manning, These exigencies include public articulations regarding how specific relationships should operate, values dimensions of particular relationship types, and larger questions about what actually constitutes a relationship.
In short, rhetorics are conduits for meaning-making about relationships in a given culture. Although romantic decision-making does not necessarily lend itself to rational understandings, it does lend itself or, perhaps, becomes entangled in individuals' and cultures' attempts to rationalize the process Duck, A variety of studies have examined how people often make emotional decisions and then, maybe even unconsciously, rationalize logical reasons for those decisions e. Once an individual buys into and articulates meaning, it asserts a particular way of seeing or envisioning a reality.
This study, then, approaches personal ads as socially constructed rhetorical visions. That is, there are two different rhetorics being observed and analyzed in this study: what I call presentational rhetoricswhere individuals engage a heightened awareness of suasive forces as they attempt to attract another in relational pursuit; and articulated rhetoricswhere individuals are less focused on language's suasive forces and the exigencies of the social situation as they present themselves to me as an interviewer.
While I separate these rhetorics here, they both play into a communicative relationality Condit, where deeper understanding is generated in context of and as constituted through each other.
Alone they are informative; by placing the two side by side and considering their interplay, each can be better understood.
Online dating profiles often serve two purposes: attracting and impressing potential mates and allowing for others to scrutinize the potential that someone might be a good match Ellison et al. Clearly, these purposes involve relational rhetorics constructed through numerous verbal and visual cues with multiple layers of meaning.
As Gibbs et al. Thus, for any given symbol offered through online personal advertisements, multiple meanings can be generated, especially because communication does not have to be intentional to be intentionally strategic Kellerman, Consequently, the choices made in presentational rhetorics of personal advertisements are multilayered, complex, and significant to the online dating process.
Rhetorical constructions of relational selves can happen in many ways in an online environment. In examining homepages, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets, Wynn and Katz discovered that homepages often constructed a linkage to offline social groups through self-description, generating an applied audience, and providing links that demonstrated other people, groups, or interests.
Individuals often include personal tastes to draw links between similarities and differences to others Liu, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets, This observation is of particular relevance to rhetorics of self-presentation that occur in online personal advertisements.
Leary and Kowalski assert that image construction generally is reliant upon considering the values of the person or persons who may be the target of a self-presentation, and constructing a self-presentation involves strategizing and acting in order to achieve desired impressions. As these considerations illustrate—and those that become apparent in examining the data collected for this study—those seeking dating relationships online face many exigencies. The methods for this study seek to explicate such exigencies.
All participants in this study were members of a commercial dating website and maintained an active online dating profile.
The site was selected based on popularity and its open-ended nature that allowed participants to put more of their own ideas into the advertisements in narrative form as opposed to some sites that guide participants with numerous questions. Participants for the study were initially located by examining a list of individuals who had been involved with a past study not related to this topic and who indicated interest in being involved with future research studies.
From there, participants were located through snowball sampling with an eye toward generating as diverse a sample as possible. Participants were asked to share a web link to their online personal advertisement and to bring a copy of this advertisement to an interview session. In advance of interview sessions, I familiarized myself with the personal advertisements to gain a sense of what they contained. Once meeting with the participants usually in a public location over coffee or teaI covered six items.
While participants were answering these questions, I took notes about anything they talked about that did not appear in their personal ads. Do you mind taking me through it and telling me aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets each element? I want to go through them one by one and hear about your choice to not include them in your online ad, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets.
The interview was structured so as that the first four questions would generate an articulated rhetoric that spoke to how individuals were presenting their relational selves to a segment of the social order given that I identified myself as a social scientist and that the individuals were not pursuing a romantic relationship with me. The fifth question served as a validity check.
The sixth question allowed for me to further consider the relationally discursive component of this study. That is, given that this research seeks to understand rhetorical dimensions of online dating profiles, comparing the presentational rhetorics in the actual personal ads separate from the interview sessions with the articulated rhetorics from the interview sessions questions and then examining participants' rhetorical articulations of aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets between online and offline discourses question 6 allowed for a fuller rhetorical understanding of the relationality of both rhetorics.
This brevity made sense given the simple nature of the questions; and it was particularly appropriate given the shorter length of most of the personal ads. After transcribing, a total of double-spaced pages of data were available for analysis as well as 30 personal advertisements that contained both words usually about words per participant, not including standard demographic categories and images photos per ad. All participants indicated that they were searching for a long-term relationship.
In line with the goals of this study, an analytical method was sought that allowed for a deep consideration of the means being used to form presentational and articulated rhetorics of dating. To that end, values coding Saldaña, was employed.
Saldaña developed values coding from the work of LeCompte and Preissle as a way of interpretively analyzing data in consideration of values, attitudes, and beliefs. This articulation of values, attitudes, and beliefs lines up well with the traditional rhetorical proofs of ethos, pathos, and logos, respectively.
Once salient attitudes, values, and beliefs are assessed, the researcher then examines how they collectively allow a system of meaning. To this end, values coding was applied separately to the personal advertisements and to the interview data.
Each sentence was considered in terms of the beliefs, values, and aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets it contained. Typically sentences would require being coded with multiple beliefs, values, and attitudes; and many statements were coded as both an attitude and a value or as an attitude and a belief e, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets.
Categories were interpretively derived from coding results. Given this study's focus on intrapersonal notions of self as they apply to interpersonal relationships and presentation of those relationships to others, the fit seemed strong. In the interest of relevance, only dominant themes or types are presented here to consider differences between the presentational rhetorics found in online advertisements and the articulated rhetorics found during the interviewing process.
The application of values coding revealed that for both the presentational online and articulated interview rhetorics values seemed to be at the center of the discourses, especially as sentences or statements that were coded for attitudes or beliefs were often justified or supported by participants with a statement that was values-laden discursively undergirding attitudes and beliefs with values.
Moreover, and as the data illustrate, values, beliefs, and attitudes were often used to establish ethos. The results are explained in detail, beginning with presentational values, aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. Online advertisements clearly employed presentational rhetorics to construct a sense that those seeking dating partners valued drama-free relationships and lifestyles.
In turn, ethos is established in that the person placing the advertisement is not the type of person to seek such a relationship and is not likely to be drama-oriented him or herself, either. When those creating the advertisements walked me through sections that were coded as drama-oriented, they often explained they were trying to convey that they themselves were not the dramatic type.
As some of the data included in the previous category illustrate, another dominant value presented in ads is harmony. I want to spend my time sharing life with the one I'm with. One assertion extracted from the personal advertisements is that some people who are engaging online dating are not serious, but that the individuals represented in the ads are as is indicated in the beliefs section of this study and that they value that in a dating relationship as well.
Write me if your [sic] serious to[sic]. Now I need something more. Life experience was also rhetorically constructed as a value in personal advertisements. Values emerging from interviews were often derived from direct articulations of attitudes see the articulated attitudes section as well as articulated beliefs. Additionally, and as one might expect, many individuals articulated value by pointing out their own moral high ground in dating relationships and other aspects of their lives, such as holding a job.
Participants were much more active in constructing values of hard work in their articulated interview rhetorics.
This value was often associated with desiring a partner who is gainfully employed and financially stable see articulated attitudes or, in the case of men seeking women, with being that partner. This articulated value matched up closely to the presentational value found in online personals. Unlike the other three identity categories in the study, women seeking men did not present rhetorics valuing spontaneity in their online personal advertisements.
During interviews, however, women seeking men included it, too, meaning all four identity aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets articulated the value.
You know, hard worker, family oriented, serious, free of crap from other parts of his life. And, uh, we're, we're both committed and there's no drama aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets, and, it's uh, it feels right.
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Jan 5, - Romantic courtship is often described as taking place in a dating market where men and women compete for mates, but the detailed structure and dynamics of dating markets have historically been difficult to quantify for lack of suitable data. In recent years, however, the advent and vigorous growth of the online dating industry has provided a rich new source of information on mate Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets. They do this for 3 rounds. Experts will meet with Narrators one-on-one, you do not know the people on the dating app and giving them access to your social media profile like photos of your family could be risky We present an empirical analysis of heterosexual dating markets in four U.S. cities using data from a popular online dating service. Romantic courtship is often described as taking place in a dating market where men and women compete for mates, but the detailed structure and dynamics of dating markets have historically been difficult to quantify for lack of suitable data
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