A Swipe And A Half. A Mixed Methods Research On How Dating Apps Changed The Way We Think About Love

Social Medias enable new forms of relationships and create new interaction contexts (boyd and Ellison 2007, Boccia Altieri 2012, boyd 2014); given this premise we propose to investigate how the technology used for courtship, in particular Tinder, influences the creation of social representations (Moscovici, 2001) and the construction of identity. Our work explores the interdependence between two aspects: Tinder as a technological platform and dating apps as catalysts for social representations. The main objective is to explore the hypothesis of a circularity in the construction of the meanings that users share as social representations around Tinder. The research design is based on an integrated mixed methods approach (Maxwell and Lumis, 2003) aimed at understanding how the usage of dating apps influences the behaviors and beliefs of users. After an analysis of emerging literature (Ranzini and Lutz, 2016; David and Cambre, 2016; Bryant and Sheldon, 2017), we conducted two focus groups meant as a preliminary study about the habits, meanings and perceptions tinder users share about dating. This explorative research, presented at IASSR Conference (2019) highlighted meaningful research paths related to the usage of Tinder, and the selfpresentation, self-perception and interaction of its users. As we keep analyzing the two-way influences between tinder as a technological object and its social implications, we built a survey which was conceptualized on the synthesis of the first results. The empirical findings suggests that further discussion and research on the topic of online dating is needed as we are approaching new ways of thinking about relationships and love.