Swiping right for love?

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Swiping right for love?

A study about the relationship between Tinder usage and self-esteem

Marit Rönnestad

Bachelor thesis 15c Department of Statistics

Uppsala University Supervisor: Katrin Kraus

Spring 2017

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Abstract

In order of measuring the relationship between Tinder intensity and self-esteem, the Tinder Intensity Scale was developed in this present study. The scale was developed with help from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) measuring dimensionality and Cronbach's alpha testing the interrelations between the scale items. The EFA found that the Tinder Intensity Scale (Cronbach’s alpha 0.75) consists of two dimensions, one measuring frequency and emotional connection and the other measured dating behavior, such as being the first one to contact a match. The index-scores were used to measure the relationship between the self-esteem score and Tinder Intensity Scale and the scales’ two dimensions. The findings of this study suggest that the relationship between self-esteem and Tinder intensity is rather weak for both men and women, but slightly higher for men’s dating behavior and self-esteem. A reason for this could be due to the low intensity on Tinder in this sample. For future research, it is suggested to examine the relationship on a larger sample. Another suggestion is to determine causality between Tinder use and self-esteem by doing a longitudinal study, where self-esteem is measured pre-Tinder usage and after using Tinder.

Key words

Rosenberg Self-esteem scale, exploratory factor analysis, Tinder Intensity Scale

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Location-based technology have made it more accessible meeting new people close-by. The dating apps available look much like other social networking sites where a user can share self- promoting pictures and chat with other users. This raises the question: does the use of dating apps have a relationship with self-esteem? This paper focuses on the relationship between the dating app Tinder and self-esteem.

1.2 Background

In this section, the concept of self-esteem will be defined with help from previous research, social networking sites will be explained and an overview of Tinder will be presented.

1.2.1 Self-esteem

The concept that most people call self-esteem in everyday language is defined as ‘global self- esteem’ (Rosenberg, Rosenberg, Schooler, Schoenbach 1995). Global self-esteem is described as one’s overall belief in oneself, that the person is equally worthy and capable as anyone else.

Depending on if a person has high or low self-esteem, it will affect him or her in different ways.

Self-esteem matters in issues such as how individuals handle success and failure (Dodgson &

Wood 1998). Low self-esteem is known to be related to depressions (Orth and Robins, 2013) and is known to have an influence on both professional and academic performance (Lane, J., Lane, A. M., Kyprianou 2004). Beyond influencing performance, several studies show that self- esteem also differ between women and men, where women have on average lower self-esteem than men (Kling 1999; Choma et al. 2010; Frost & McKelvie 2014). McLeod (2012) states that self-esteem decreases during adolescence and that researchers have explained this to be because of adolescents’ body image changes through puberty.

There are several scales to measure self-esteem and one of the most well-known among them is the Rosenberg Self-esteem scale. The Rosenberg Self-esteem scale was created by Morris Rosenberg (Rosenberg 1965) and contains 10 items on a 4-point Likert scale where the respondent specifies their level of agreement from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The items consist of both positive and negative statements regarding the respondent’s feelings towards him- or herself. To measure self-esteem every answer is given a value from zero to three giving a total score of 30, where a higher score implies higher self-esteem and a value

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below 15 is considered low self-esteem. The positive statements are given a high value with strong agreement such that strongly agree = 3, agree = 2, disagree = 1 and strongly disagree = 0. The negative statements are reversed so that they are given low values with strong agreement so that strongly agree = 0, agree = 1, disagree = 2 and strongly disagree = 3.

1.2.2 Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites (SNS), also called social media, are used as a way of connecting and communicating with people online (Jones, 2009). People with low self-esteem benefit more than people with high self-esteem from using social media such as Facebook (Ellison, Lampe, Steinfeld 2007). Social media is used as a way of bridging social relationships and low self- esteem correlates higher with Facebook Intensity than high self-esteem (ibid). Vogel et al.

(2014) found that a large use of Facebook had a negative correlation with self-esteem and Blomfield Neira (2014) found that investment in SNS was linked to lower self-esteem.

Blomfield Neira (2014) also found that female adolescents were more invested in social media and had more negative aspects than male social media-users. Mehdizadeh (2010) found that a relationship between high usage of social media and self-esteem exist, especially for women and Vogel et al. (2014) found that higher usage of social media leads to lower self-esteem.

1.2.3 Tinder

Tinder is a location-based dating app first released in 2012 (Bilton, 2014). That the app is location-based means that the users can set the distance between 0 and 160 km themselves.

Other settings on the app is to decide an age-interval for the possible matches and the user’s sexual orientation. The app let the user see other profiles nearby where the user can choose between three options; swipe right, swipe left or super like. Swiping right indicates that the user likes the person and if that person swipes right back, it will be a match which allows for the two users to chat with each other. Swiping left indicates that the user does not like the other person, but that person will never be notified of that. The super like-function allows the user to notify the other person that they super liked him or her and the other person must either swipe right, left or super like back.

According to Tinder’s website the app has more than 26 million matches a day and Felim M., Globalwebindex’s Trends manager comments on Globalwebindex’s report on “Location-Based Apps Trend Report – Q1 2015” that 60% of those using location-based dating apps are men.

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Men spend about 7.2 minutes each time they use Tinder swiping left and right where as women spend about 8.5 minutes each time according to Tinder.

Tyson, Haddadi and Seto (2016) have investigated the reasons why men and women use Tinder and according to their findings more men than women use Tinder to have casual sex.

They also found that men are more active in contacting their matches the first time than women.

1.3 Purpose

The purpose of this thesis is to see if a relationship between usage of Tinder and self-esteem exist for people between 18-30 years old in Sweden. To estimate this relationship an index measuring Tinder intensity must be developed. The main part of the thesis will focus on developing the Tinder Intensity Scale and examine if a relationship between Tinder intensity and self-esteem exist.

2 Methods

In this section, the methods used in this paper are described. Firstly, the survey and collection of data are explained, secondly the scale construction of the Tinder Intensity Scale is described and thirdly the statistical methods used in this thesis are presented. The significance level used for all statistical tests in this thesis is 𝛼 = 0.05.

2.1 Survey

To collect data, a survey with 36 questions on social background, self-esteem and Tinder usage was created. The formulary is found in Appendix A. To measure self-esteem the 10 item Rosenberg self-esteem scale (RSES) was used while the 7-item Tinder Intensity Scale (TIS) was designed for measuring Tinder frequency and attitudes. In the survey the question “Are you using Tinder?” had four possible options. The options “Yes, I use it regularly” and “Yes, but I use it rarely” was coded 4 respective 3. The options “I have Tinder installed on my phone but I do not use the app” and “No” was interpreted as not using Tinder.

Before publishing the survey, a pre-study was completed to test face validity. Face validity is to what extent the questions are believed to cover what they are supposed to measure. In the pre-study, four individual interviews with one woman and three men were conducted. They were asked to explain how they interpreted the questions and the alternatives, if they felt they could give a truthful answer given the options and if they rather would have answered in a different way. After the interviews, a few smaller corrections in the survey were made so the questions should be perceived in the same way by all respondents.

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2.2 Tinder Intensity Scale

The Tinder Intensity Scale was inspired by the Facebook Intensity Scale (FBI) (Chronbach's alpha 0.83) created by Ellison et al. (2007). The scale was created according to Ellison et al.

(2007, p.1150) to “obtain a better measurement of Facebook usage than frequency or duration indices”. Ensuring test validity, the Tinder Intensity Scale was created so that not only frequency was measured but also emotional connection to Tinder with questions similar as to those in the Facebook Intensity Scale. Test validity is the extent to which the questions in the survey measures what it is intended to measure.

Creating the Tinder Intensity Scale was done in three steps using SPSS; standardizing items, creating the index and then test reliability with Cronbach’s alpha. All the variables measuring Tinder usage was first standardized so they ranged from 0 to 1. The reason for standardizing the items was because of the items having different answering alternatives, such as “number of minutes” and the 4-item Likert scale. There was no relevant theory as to why the items should have unequal weights in the index. Secondly, the standardized items were used to create an index called Tinder Intensity Scale. Thirdly, the Tinder Intensity Scale’s reliability was tested with help from Cronbach’s alpha and items were deleted until the value of Cronbach’s alpha no longer improved. The Cronbach’s alpha is a measure of internal consistency of a test ranging from 0 to 1 where a higher value imply that the items measure the same construct (Tavakol &

Dennick 2011). Cronbach’s alpha for the Tinder Intensity Scale with 7 items is 0.75, which is an acceptable value of internal interrelation (Tavakol & Dennick 2011). The reason for deleting all other items from the Tinder Intensity Scale was because Cronbach’s Alpha indicated that they did not measure the same concept. The items in the final Tinder Intensity Scale can be found in Table 1. The Tinder Intensity Scale’s score ranges from 0 to 7 since the maximum value for each item is 1. The Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale’s reliability was also tested and the 10 item-scale had a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.903.

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Table 1. Summary statistics of the items in the Tinder Intensity Scale

Variable Mean (median) Standard deviation

Are you using Tinder? * 3.47 (3) 0.50

How many minutes do you on average spend on Tinder per

day? * 15.47 (10) 28.83

Mode Median

Tinder is a part of my everyday routine Disagree Disagree

If I could not use Tinder anymore I would get upset Strongly disagree Strongly disagree Usually, when I get match I try meet in person Disagree Disagree Usually, I am the one starting the conversation Disagree Disagree

Usually, I answer when people write to me Agree Agree

* Unstandardized items to see actual minutes and regularity.

2.3 Factor Analysis

Factor analysis is a technique of measuring underlying structures in the data. The common factor method is used to identify underlying structures or dimensions in the Tinder Intensity Scale by considering the shared variance between the variables (Hair et al. 2014). This is done by measuring the relationship between a latent, not observable, variable and some observed variables by using correlation matrices. This is visualized in equation (1):

𝑥₍ = 𝜆₍₍𝜉₍+ 𝜆_(,𝜉_,. . . +𝜆_(-𝜉_-+ 𝜀₍ (1)

where 𝑥₍ represents the observed variable, 𝜆₍₍ represent the loadings for the latent variables 𝜉₍ on 𝑥₍ , k is the number of factors included in the model and 𝜀₍ denotes the error term.

Before proceeding with factor analysis, some assumptions need to be fulfilled. A study should have a sample size with no less than 50 observations, preferably 100 or more, and more observations than variables. It is desired to have a ratio of 5 observations per variable but if this is not fulfilled only cautious interpretations should be made (Hair et al. 2014, p. 100). These assumptions are fulfilled in this study. Hair et al. (2014) state that other important assumptions are the conceptual assumption about an underlying structure in the variables, that the sample is

“homogeneous with respect to the underlying structure” and that “departures from normality, homoscedasticity, and linearity apply only to the extent that they diminish the observed correlations”. The internal correlation between the variables was tested by the Kaiser’s measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) in SAS 9.4 and the result was 0.76 which is meritorious (Hair et al. 2014). MSA is an index ranging from 0 to 1 measuring the interrelations between the

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variables where values below 0.50 is unacceptable and a value of 0.7 or more is considered meritorious or better (ibid).

An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with oblique promax rotation was done to investigate if the Tinder Intensity Scale was unidimensional. The oblique promax rotation was chosen because it is said to perform well in finding simple structure in correlated variables according to Finch (2006) and because it was believed that the possible factors in TIS were correlated.

According to Hair et al. (2014, p.115), ±0.3 to ±0.4 for the factor loadings is the minimal level for interpretation of structure. The objective of this method was to investigate the underlying constructs in the variables.

The variables in the data are both continuous and categorical and therefore the correlation estimations had to be measured with polyserial correlations (Jöreskog, 1996, p. 23). The variables included are the 7 items from the Tinder Intensity Scale shown in Table 1 and the 10 items from the Rosenberg self-esteem scale are shown in Appendix A.

2.4 Independent Samples t-test

The independent samples t-test is a way of comparing means between independent groups. The dependent variable is continuous and the independent variable is categorical with two independent groups, such as male and female. For the independent samples t-test the hypotheses are stated as following

𝐻₃: 𝜇₍ = 𝜇_,

𝐻₆: 𝜇₍ ≠ 𝜇_,

where 𝜇₍ and 𝜇_, are the population means for group 1 and group 2, respectively.

To compare the means, some assumptions regarding the data need to be fulfilled. The first assumption is that the observations and the groups should be independent of each other, secondly there should be no significant outliers and the dependent variable should be approximately normally distributed for each group. Secondly, the test requires equal variance in both groups which can be tested with Levene’s test for homogeneity (equal variance). The hypotheses for Levene’s test for homogeneity are expressed as

𝐻₃: 𝜎₍^,− 𝜎_,^, = 0

𝐻₆: 𝜎₍^, − 𝜎_,^, ≠ 0

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where 𝜎₍^, and 𝜎_,^, are the group variances for group 1 and group 2. The assumptions for the t- test are fulfilled.

3 Data

The data were collected by self-selection, where the survey was created and published at Surveymonkey.com. The Tinder & Self-esteem survey was shared by a link published on Facebook and Reddit’s “Sample size”. In the introduction of the survey it said explicitly that the purpose of the survey was to collect data regarding Tinder usage and self-esteem for people between the age 18 to 30 and it was completely anonymous to protect the respondents’ integrity.

Those who did not use Tinder were still allowed to answer the Rosenberg Self-esteem scale to be able to use these respondents as a control group for self-esteem. The survey was available from 2017-03-11 until 2017-04-02.

3.1 Missing Values

A total sample of N=396 was collected. The Little’s missing completely at random (MCAR) test was used to investigate if a pattern could be found in the missing values. Little’s MCAR had a p-value of 0.31, and the data are missing completely at random. This indicate that all remedies for missing values are allowed (Hair et al. 2014) and the advantage of this is that the statistical power increases as number of observations increases. However, 51 people answered only the four first questions regarding age, sex, sexual orientation and education and 12 people had 30% missing values and/or did not belong to the population due to wrong age. These 63 people were removed. Six of these were Tinder users with missing values above 30% making them candidates for deletion according to Hair et al. (2014, p. 46) which makes the total sample size 333 observations. Only 149 of the 333 observations reported themselves as active on Tinder. The 149 observations had missing values between 0.6-7.7%. The missing values for the variable “How many minutes do you on average spend on Tinder?” was replaced with the variable mean while the missing values for the other Likert-scale variables was replaced with the mode.

The average age among those who were removed from the sample is 25 years old, where the eldest respondent is 48 years old and the youngest is 18. The standard deviation is 6 years. The gender distribution among those removed is approximately equal, 51% is male and 49 % is female. One observation had specified spending 320 minutes per day on Tinder which is an outlier and that answer was removed from the analysis. One of the variables, “have you met a

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partner on dating apps/sites before?” have 67.5 % missing values and is also removed from the analysis. (Hair et al. 2014, p. 46)

3.2 Descriptive Statistics

The average age in the sample was 23 years for both Tinder-users and non-users. The group of non-users contained 98 women and 86 men whereas the group of Tinder-users contained 72 women and 77 men. In the group of non-users, women’s average self-esteem score was 19.05 and for the women that use Tinder the average score was 17.39 (see Table 2). For male Tinder- users the average self-esteem score was 19.14 but for the non-users the average score was 20.36.

For both men and women that use Tinder the average self-esteem score was 18.30 and for the non-users the average score was 19.66. The RSES-score have a possible maximum value of 30 which also is the maximum value of the score for both men and women in the sample with 149 Tinder-users. The lowest possible score is 0, but the lowest score in the sample is 4 for both men and women (see Table 2). The Tinder Intensity Scale ranges from 0 to 7 but the maximum value of Tinder Intensity-score for Tinder-users in the sample is 6.27 and for women 4.93. The average Tinder Intensity-score for men is 3.15 and for women 2.09 (see Table 2).

Table 2. Summary statistics of the scores for Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale and Tinder Intensity Scale for Tinder- users

Mean Standard

deviation Maximum Minimum

Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale Men 19.14 5.95 30 4

Women 17.39 5.2 30 4

Tinder Intensity Scale Men 3.15 1.33 6.27 0.35

Women 2.09 1.19 4.93 0.02

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4 Results

In this section, the results from the independent sample’s t-test, the exploratory factor analysis for the Tinder Intensity Scale and the correlations between the scores from the Tinder Intensity scale and Rosenberg self-esteem scale are presented.

4.1 Independent sample’s t-test

An independent samples t-test was used to test if the difference in self-esteem between Tinder- users and non-users was significant or not. The difference in self-esteem between the groups is significant with a p-value of 0.03, see Table 7 in Appendix B, confirming that non-users have higher self-esteem than Tinder-users.

The difference in average number of minutes a Tinder-user spends on Tinder each time was also tested between men and women. Men spend about 15 minutes per day on Tinder while women spend nearly 12 minutes per day, see Figure 1. The p-value is 0.28 thus the difference is not significant. Women do not spend more time on Tinder than men, but the average time for men is higher than for women in this sample. When Tinder Intensity Scale-score is compared instead of minutes between men and women the difference is significant, see Table 7 in Appendix B.

Figure 1: The average in minutes spent on Tinder for men and women.

Another independent samples t-test was analyzed to test if there is any difference in intensity between people with high and low self-esteem. The Tinder Intensity Scale was used as a dependent variable and high and low self-esteem as the independent variables. The Levene’s test’s p-value is 0.46 and accepts the null-hypothesis of equal variance in Tinder intensity for high and low self-esteem. The p-value for the t-test is 0.41, see Table 7, and the difference in

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12,12

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

Men Women

Average minutes

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Tinder intensity between users with high and low self-esteem is not significant. The average Tinder Intensity score for people with high self-esteem was 2.7 while people with low self- esteem had an average Tinder Intensity score of 2.44, see Figure 2.

Figure 2. Graph of the average Tinder intensity for high and low self-esteem

In the survey men and women could choose between several options as to why they used Tinder.

Percentage of answers between men and women and their reasons to use Tinder is shown in Table 3.

Table 3. The reasons as to why men and women use Tinder in percentage

I use Tinder to… Men

(%) Women (%) p-value Date someone I have/or hope to have a romantic interest in 74.90 70.8 0.66

Meet the love of my life 31.2 23.6 0.30

Meet new friends 13.0 19.4 0.29

Meet casual sexual partners/to have casual sexual

encounters 71.4 43.1 0.00

Match with people 50.6 56.9 0.45

Have fun 54.5 55.6 0.90

Because I’m bored 66.2 83.3 0.17

To keep myself updated with what is considered to be

trendy 3.9 0 0.09

As a social activity with my friends, for example swiping

together 13.0 40.3 0.00

The only significant differences in men and women’s reasons to use Tinder is when the reason is “To meet casual sexual partners/to have casual sexual encounters” and “as a social activity with my friends, for example swiping together”. 71.4% of the men said that they use Tinder to meet sexual partners whereas only 43.1% of the women use Tinder for the same reason. 40.3%

2,7 2,44

0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3

High self-esteem Low self-esteem

Tinder intensity score

Tinder Intensity Scale

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women claimed to use Tinder as a social activity but only 13% of the men use it as a social activity. When correcting for multiplicity the results are still significant.

4.2 Exploratory Factor Analysis for Tinder Intensity Scale

As a part of the scale development, an exploratory factor analysis was performed on the total sample of Tinder-users (n=149). The correlation matrix with Pearsons correlation coefficient for the standardized Tinder Intensity Scale-items, show evidence of some smaller correlations between the variables “Are you using Tinder?”, “Usually, I answer when people write to me”.

There are some small correlations between “How many minutes do you on average spend on Tinder per day?” and “Usually, when I get a match I try to meet in person” suggesting several dimensions in the TIS. See Table 8, Appendix B for the correlation matrix. After using the promax rotation, two factors were found (see Table 4). This indicates that the Tinder Intensity Scale consists of two dimensions. The first factor explains if Tinder is used regularly or irregularly, how many minutes spent on Tinder each time, if Tinder is a part of the daily routine and getting upset if Tinder would be unavailable. The second factor explains users usually trying to meet a match on Tinder in person, usually starting a conversation and usually answer the messages one get which could be described as dating behavior. To summarize, App-usage explains the amount a user spends on Tinder and regular frequency, while Dating-behavior explains how actively a user is trying to connect with a match.

Table 4. Factor loadings for the Tinder Intensity Scale

Variable App usage Dating

behavior

Are you using Tinder? 0.68

How many minutes do you on average spend on Tinder per day? 0.58

Tinder is a part of my everyday routine 0.79

If I could not use Tinder anymore I would get upset 0.48

Usually, when I get a match I try to meet in person 0.60

Usually, I am the one starting the conversation 0.70

Usually, I answer when people write to me 0.50

App usage and Dating behavior have a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.69, respectively which is close to the limit of 0.7 for acceptable interrelations (Tavakol & Dennick 2011). Some summary statistics of the two different dimensions of the Tinder Intensity Scale are found in Table 5.

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Table 5: Summary statistics of the two dimensions of the Tinder Intensity Scale

App usage Dating behavior

Mean 1.33 1.81

Men Median (mode) 1.38 (2.15) 2.00 (2.00)

Standard deviation 0.87 0.61

Mean 0.97 1.12

Women Median (mode) 0.67 (0.05) 1.00 (1.33)

Standard deviation 0.92 0.53

4.3 Relationship Between Tinder Intensity and Self-esteem

One way of investigating the relationship between self-esteem and Tinder intensity is by looking at the correlations for the different scores. The only high correlations are between the Tinder Intensity Scale score and the scores for App usage and Dating behavior, see Table 6.

The reason for the high correlations are because App usage and Dating behavior is a part of the Tinder Intensity Scale, thus they should have a high correlation. The correlation between self- esteem score and the scores for App usage, Dating behavior and Tinder Intensity are all 0.18 or less, indicating small correlations between self-esteem and Tinder intensity.

Table 6. Correlation matrix between self-esteem score, Tinder Intensity Scale score, App usage-score and Dating behavior score.

RSES TIS App usage Dating

behavior

RSES 1

Men TIS 0.06 1

App usage -0.00 0.90 1

Dating behavior 0.18 0.78 0.42 1

RSES 1

Women TIS 0.10 1

App usage 0.16 0.91 1

Dating behavior -0.04 0.68 0.30 1

5 Discussion

The weak relationship between self-esteem and Tinder intensity differ from earlier research that states that high use of social media and self-esteem have a negative relationship. One of the

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self-esteem is not significant. Earlier research suggests a relationship between high usage of social media and self-esteem which also could be an indicator of why the relationship is relatively small. Another reason could be that Tinder and social media such as Facebook, Twitter etc. may not be comparable. Another interesting result is that the difference in self- esteem between men and women that use Tinder is not significant but women in this sample have lower self-esteem on average, which supports earlier research where it is stated that men have higher self-esteem than women.

The difference in minutes between men and women is not significant but the difference in Tinder intensity is, where men score higher than women on the Tinder Intensity Scale. Earlier research has suggested that women do not approach men on Tinder to the same extent as men approach women on Tinder. In the present study, men score higher on dating behavior than women which could be because of men being more active in contacting their matches, in line with earlier findings.

The differences between men and women in this thesis have limited generalizability to the population because of two reasons; the first reason is because of the non-probability sampling through self-selection. The participants chose to fill out the survey, which could mean that the results are biased. The second reason is because the sample is rather small. Because of the Tinder Intensity Scale's face validity and the internal consistency between the items in the index (Cronbach's alpha 0.75), there is nothing showing evidence of the index not being generalizable. The index should although be validated by another sample to exclude the possibility of finding the results in this thesis by chance.

The Tinder Intensity Scale should be validated and the reliability should be tested in another sample to investigate if the results will be the same with another sample. Since the findings in this sample support the theory of differences in Tinder intensity due to gender, the researcher recommends doing further analysis for men and women separately. The results also suggest that the Tinder Intensity Scale consists of two different dimensions and this should be considered when confirming the scale in the future. If the main question is to explain Tinder Intensity, the questions 13-22, 24 and 28-31 in Appendix A could be excluded in future research.

The relationship between self-esteem and Tinder intensity is weak, but should be investigated in a larger sample. The relationship could also be measured by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), where the latent variables are Tinder intensity and self-esteem. For future research, it is also suggested to examine the relationship on a larger sample, but also do a longitudinal study

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where self-esteem is measured pre-Tinder usage and after using Tinder in order to be able to determine causal effects between Tinder usage and self-esteem.

6 Conclusions

For men, the highest correlation for the self-esteem score was Dating behavior, but the correlation is still low, indicating that a higher score on Dating behavior also correlates with a higher score in self-esteem. For women, this is not true. For women, a higher score in App usage correlates with a higher score in self-esteem, but also here the correlation is considered low.

This should not be interpreted as casual effects since it is not possible to know if the respondents scored higher or lower in self-esteem before starting to use Tinder. In this study, no support for a strong relationship between Tinder intensity and self-esteem is found.

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Appendix A

Tinder & self-esteem survey

1. Age 2. Sex

3. Sexual orientation Heterosexual

Bisexual Homosexual

4. Are you currently in a relationship?

Yes No 5. Education (swedish)

Upper secondary school (gymnasieutbildning)

Undergraduate level (grundnivå, grundläggande högskoleutbildning) Graduate/master’s level (avancerad nivå, grundläggande högskoleutbildning) Vocational education (yrkesutbildning)

Below is a list of statements dealing with your general feelings about yourself. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each statement. Choose the option that best describes how you feel about yourself most of the time. (The response alternatives for question 6-15 is strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree).

6. On the whole, I am satisfied with myself.

7. At times I think I am no good at all.

8. I feel that I have a number of good qualities.

9. I am able to do things as well as most other people.

10. I feel I do not have much to be proud of.

11. I certainly feel useless at times.

12. I feel that I'm a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others.

13. I wish I could have more respect for myself.

14. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I am a failure.

15. I take a positive attitude toward myself.

16. Are you using Tinder?

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Yes, I use it regularly Yes, but I use it rarely

I have Tinder installed on my phone but I do not use the app No

17. I am using Tinder

To date someone I have/or hope to have a romantic interest in To meet the love of my life

To meet new friends

To meet casual sexual partners/to have casual sexual encounters Match with people

Have fun

Because I’m bored

To keep myself updated with what is considered to be trendy As a social activity with my friends, for example swiping together 18. I have met a partner on dating apps/sites before

Yes No

19. Which dating apps are you using on a weekly basis, including Tinder?

Specify

20. How many minutes do you on average spend on Tinder per day?

Answer in minutes

21. How many profile pictures do you have right now on Tinder?

Specify number

22. How often do you change your profile picture(s) on Tinder per month?

I do not have a profile picture I change less than once a month Open answer

23. How often do you change your profile text on Tinder per month?

I do not have a profile text I change less than once a month Open answer

24. How many matches do you have on Tinder?

25. How many of the matches on Tinder have resulted in a physical meeting?

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Below is a list of statements dealing with your usage and general feelings about Tinder. Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with each statement. Choose the option that best describes how you feel most of the time. (The response alternatives for question 6-15 is strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree).

27. Tinder is a part of my everyday routine

28. If I could not use Tinder anymore I would get upset 29. Getting a match makes me happy

30. Usually, when I get a match I try to meet in person 31. Usually, I am the one starting the conversation 32. Usually, I answer when people write to me

33. I swipe left on people I think are less attractive than myself 34. I swipe right on people I think are more attractive than myself 35. I talk to my friends about Tinder and my Tinder-experiences 36. I feel ashamed to tell people I have Tinder

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Appendix B

Tables of further interest

Table 7. The independent samples t-test.

Question Levene’s

test p-value

p-value Mean difference

Std. error difference

Do people on Tinder have lower self-esteem

than non-users? 0.35 0.03 -1.37 0.64

Do women spend more time on Tinder than

men? 0.62 0.28 2.51 2.33

Do men score higher on Tinder intensity than

women? 0.50 0.00 1.06 0.20

Do women have lower self-esteem than men? 0.30 0.06 1.75 0.92 Are people with low self-esteem more active

on Tinder than people with high self-esteem? 0.46 0.41 -0.23 0.28

Table 8. The correlation matrix for the Tinder Intensity Scale

Question 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

1. Are you using Tinder? 1

2. How many minutes do you on average spend on

Tinder per day? 0.46 1

3. Tinder is a part of my daily routine 0.62 0.54 1

4. If I could not use Tinder anymore I would get upset 0.35 0.25 0.46 1 5. Usually, when I get a match I try to meet in person 0.30 0.26 0.17 0.25 1 6. Usually, I am the one starting the conversation 0.37 0.26 0.34 0.26 0.60 1 7. Usually, I answer when people write to me 0.14 0.21 0.20 0.13 0.29 0.44 1

Swiping right for love?