Based on earlier research on male-female repre­sentation of the self (Hirschman, 1987; Feingold, 1990; Gonzales & Meyers, 1993) and on the three countries’ scores on Hofstede’s cultural dimen- sions, we advance the following hypotheses, starting with gender effects. H1: Women, relative to men, are: a. More likely to make love-related references b. More likely to […]

People hold a certain view of themselves on the basis of what is perceived as culturally appropri­ate by others in the culture or within the in group (Usunier, 1996). Building on Foa and Foa’s (1974) social exchange theory and the status characteris­tics theory (see Berger, Cohen, & Zelditch, 1966; Bereger & Fisek, 1974; Humphreys & […]

[O]nline dating systems have begun to influence not only individual lives but also cultural notions of love and attraction… But despite the incredible number of people using these services, we know little about how users perceive each other… It’s possible, too, that different subpopulations of us­ers within the site are seeking entirely different things and […]

Sudhir H. Kale Bond University, Australia Mark T. Spence Bond University, Australia ABSTRACT More than half a billion users across the globe have availed themselves of e-dating services. This chap­ter looks at the marketing and cross-cultural aspects of mate-seeking behavior in e-dating. We content analyzed 238 advertisements from online matrimonial sites in three countries: India […]

As indicated in the previous sections, our goal was to describe a theory of e-dating development and to explore it empirically. The findings from our preliminary research suggest that: 1. Six distinct stages can be identified em­pirically in the e-dating career of male and female e-daters. These, as our theory pre­dicted, include: (a) constructing a […]

To address the third research question which focused on the input that e-daters received from the environment, we examined the input that the e-daters received from others, such as the number of “hits” on their Match. com profile, the number of winks made to them, the number of e-mailmessages sent to them, and the number […]

To address the second research question which focused on e-daters’ initiating contact with other e-daters, we examined e-daters ’ “active behaviors” such as the number of winks sent, e-mails sent, instant messages sent, rejection messages sent, and barring of other e-daters from communicating with the e-dater. Using a t-test for independent samples analysis, we compared […]

To address the above research questions, we conducted a number of analyses. First Research Question To address the first research question which addressed the issue of whether stages could be discerned in the activities of e-daters and whether these stages were different for males and females, descriptive statistics was used to tabulate the activi­ties of […]

Sample and Instrument Based on the literature in the previous sections, we constructed an inventory of e-dating activities that followed the six stages in our e-dating devel­opment theory (see Appendix 1 for the research inventory). We administered the inventory to a group of 22 volunteers from two undergraduate classes in a private Midwestern university in […]

• Do male and female e-daters receive dif­ferent inputs from the environment to their e-dating behavior? Our expectations were that male and female e — daters do indeed receive different input from the environment, with males getting fewer “winks,” e-mail messages and text messages than female do. Also, as indicated in relation to the previous […]