www.hookmeup.com.au & La Trobe University undertake first of its kind singles & online dating research

With the flourishing popularity of online dating as a legitimate, fun and effective way to meet singles, La Trobe University's School of Public wellness and the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, and www.hookmeup.com.au are carrying out a project to determine the experiences of young adults who employ online dating. In specific they're looking to question singles between the ages of 18 and 30.

This task grew out of a smaller report carried on by one of the investigators, Danielle Couch, when she was canvassing www.hookmeup.com.au and using online dating herself:
" I'd used several online dating sites to contact people and had my own small processes for making my direction through the online dating domain. I'd send out a wink or a kiss, perhaps we'd correspond via some emails or chat online for a spell. Then if we chose to meet face to face I'd opt to think about when and where that would be. I began questioning if other people adopted the same kind of function or did they do things otherwise. So I started formulating a research idea."


The result of Danielle's ponderings was a little research plan as a component of her post-graduate studies. She questioned 15 people online, employing chat rooms. In the consultations the participants chatted online concerning their own online dating lives, what they did and didn't do to handle risk, how many people they'd encountered, how many people they'd had sex with via online dating, did they adopt safety cautions, were they into safe sex and how did it all equate to meeting people in other ways.

" Working in public wellness, I knew there'd been more research in the U.S. dealing with the relationship between internet dating and the spreading of sexually carried infections - how the internet may let you encounter people speedily and how it may be an efficient method to access casual sex mates and potentially disperse infection. I wondered was this related in Australia? Did other online daters recollect about this stuff? Was it any different to heading out and picking somebody up in a club on the weekend? "

The interviews ran from 30 minutes to 3 hours in length, depending on what each individual wanted to share and time constraints.

" One thing to consider when interviewing singles online is that you have to realise they're in all likelihood multi-tasking. We all do it while we're online. So I recognised when I was chatting with people I was one of numerous things they might be executing - that's just the realism of being online. I had one unforgettable consultation where a participant was in four different dating related chats, and in addition to watching some sexually explicit webcam action. I recall her apologising to me at one point as she was a bit slow in replying to one of my inquiries as she was getting distracted by the web-cam display. "

The broad consensus was the singles interviewed enjoyed the routine; in fact various interviewees would often times update Danielle via chat on their most recent stories as they wanted these enclosed in the project.

The determinations from this earlier report have led to the new project. Over the next few months the research workers* are looking to interview between 30 and 40 people through chat about their online dating lives. If you'd like to be a component of this project and share your sentiments, experiences and views about online dating then just add onlinedating@latrobe.edu.au to your messenger or visit project webpage to find out more. All consultations will be private.