- Project Summary: In no more than 200 words, provide a brief description of your project, including the puzzle you intend to address, the key questions your project attempts to answer, and a brief discussion of how you intend on answering those questions.
In 2013, Tinder employed Jessica Carbino as their first (and last) in-house sociologist. Despite the company’s efforts to consider the sociological impact of their app, they have still had shortcomings in creating an equitable experience for all users. Our project plans to look at Tinder usage of Bowdoin students. Our research will incorporate a consideration of wider sociological studies of dating apps, including dating app behavior, algorithmic bias, and racism on the apps. We will look at Bowdoin and the larger Brunswick community and consider how local dynamics lay into user engagement. Dating apps like Tinder market themselves as easing the process of finding romance and intimacy online. However, users do not have uniform experiences on Tinder. The key questions guiding our research are “who actually gets to experience the promise of Tinder in Maine? How do experiences vary for sexual minorities vs heterosexual cisgender users? How are students constructing and performing identities on Tinder? Does the app’s algorithm reflect societal biases or does it create its own biases in and of itself?” We intend to answer our research questions by conducting interviews with Bowdoin students, and possibly supplementing our qualitative data with survey data.