Dating Partners Don’t Always Prefer “Their Own Kind”: Some Multiracial Daters Get Bonus Points in the Dating Game |
Council on Contemporary Families
Austin, Texas
2015-07-01
Celeste Vaughan Curington
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Ken-Hou Lin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin
Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Professor of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Celeste Curington, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Ken-Hou Lin, University of Texas at Austin, and Jennifer Lundquist, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Despite growing approval of interracial dating, researchers have long documented the existence of a racial hierarchy within the dating world, with white women and men the most preferred partners, blacks the least preferred, and Asians and Hispanics in between. But where do the growing numbers of biracial and multiracial individuals fit into this hierarchy? Do they too get ranked by descending shades of lightness?
Between 2000 and 2010, the number of individuals who identified themselves to Census takers as being of two or more races increased by a third. These nine million individuals still represent less than three percent of the population. But studies predict that by the year 2050, nearly one in five Americans may claim a multiracial background. How will this affect dating and marriage patterns in the United States?
We recently completed a study of how multiracial daters fare in a mainstream online dating website. Using 2003-2010 data from one of the largest dating websites in the United States, we examined nearly 6.7 million initial messages sent between heterosexual women and men. Specifically, we looked into how often Asian-white, black-white, and Hispanic-white daters received a response to their messages compared to their monoracial counterparts…
Read the entire paper here.
Tags: Celeste Curington, Celeste V. Curington, Celeste Vaughan Curington, Council on Contemporary Families, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Jennifer Lundquist, Ken-Hou Lin