Sociologist Elizabeth Bruch did not set out to study online dating. She used to focus on neighborhood segregation and residential mobility, because she is interested in how people find opportunities, pick strategies, and learn from mistakes. 

Then she read about researchers studying online dating, and realized her research questions apply to this setting as well. 

Bruch worked with dating app companies on some studies, but never got to do quite what she wanted: for instance, she said she had ideas on how to help people find and discover matches more easily, but could not get companies to implement her ideas.

“I felt very stymied in my ability to …  have a back and forth level of communication where the science can inform the app and the app can inform the science,” Bruch said. “That’s really kind of the fantasy.”

But that fantasy became a reality when she met psychologist Amie Gordon, who studies dating and romantic relationships. 

Gordon has studied couples who are in a relationship, but has not studied what happens at the beginning of one. She is also interested in why people stay in or end relationships.

“People have been doing this research for decades, but we still can’t reliably predict whether any given couple is going to stay together or not, from a psychological perspective,” Gordon said. 

Gordon and Bruch are both at the University of Michigan, and realized that their research interests and academic disciplines match perfectly. 

“Amie and I have a lot of complementarities in our scholarship,” Bruch said. “Sociologists focus all their attention on people’s entries and exits into relationships. We spend much less time learning what happens while they’re in those relationships. And psychologists sort of focus on what happens when they’re in them, but don’t necessarily pay as much attention to the entries and the exits.” 

Dating apps collect a “treasure trove” of data on relationships, but the companies usually don’t share the data with scientists. So Bruch and Gordon formed a research team and designed their own dating app for students at the University of Michigan, called Revel.

Read the full article on WHYY.