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Abstract

Despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly commonplace to find a partner through a dating agency, and there is an increasing awareness among personal relations researchers that dating agencies are a rich source of data, research into such agencies has typically been very limited and sporadic. In the present study, two types of analyses were conducted to examine the representativeness of dating agency members in relation to other indices of a more general population. In the first analysis, demographic comparisons were made between data from a large survey of members of Britain's largest dating agency and recent census information using the criteria of occupation, education and racial background as the comparative data. In the second analysis, the social competence scores of seventy-six young dating agency members on Levenson & Gottman's (1978) Dating and Assertion skills Questionnaire (DAQ) were contrasted with scores on these scales obtained by previous researchers. Results indicated that, as anticipated, dating agency members differed from the more general British population in having attained a higher educational level and in occupying higher status jobs. Paradoxically, however, such otherwise successful individuals had fewer presentation skills than previous DAQ respondents. The implications of such findings and the need for further research are discussed.

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Dating Agency Members: Are they `Different'?

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