Downloading Love: A Content Analysis Of Internet Personal Advertisements Placed By College Students

College Student Journal, March, 1999 by Mark Nicholas Hatala, Milewski, Katherine, Daniel W. Baack

Within the confines of the College Town area, we chose to code only ads which explicitly stated that the ad placer was a college student or mentioned a college or university that they were currently attending. This was done to avoid the contamination of a number of ads placed by older individuals (mostly men) seeking college students for their own purposes.

Coding Scheme

Each personal advertisement was analyzed for content in terms of what the ad placer mentioned about themselves, and what they were seeking in others. More specifically, twenty-two variables of interest were analyzed in terms of the following six categories: demographic information (gender, sexual orientation, marital status), academic information (year in school, major, Greek), physical information (age, age preference, height, weight, ethnicity), computer specific information (homepage, emoticons), relationship information (friendship, internet friendship, sex, long-term relationship, commitment, seeking ethnicity) and miscellaneous information (music interests, movie interests, other interests). A wordcount was also conducted for each ad. Microsoft Word 5.0 was used for the wordcount in order to achieve an objective measure of the length of each ad.

Each ad was coded by at least two of the three authors. All coders had been trained in previous research on personal ads (Hatala & Prehodka, 1996), and interrater reliability was over 95 percent. Discrepancies in coding were resolved by returning to the original ads, and no discrepancies were left unresolved.

Results

In general, findings from this study showed that a substantial minority of ad placers did not reveal basic information about such obvious traits such as their gender, sexual orientation, and race. In terms of a demographic profile, most ad placers were heterosexual white men either at the beginning or at the end of their college careers. Results in terms of our six categories of interest follow.

Demographic information. Ad placers were not evenly split by gender, with 70% of the ad placers men, and 21% women. Nine percent of ad placers declined to reveal their gender. In terms of sexual orientation, 3% of ad placers were homosexual, 60% were heterosexual, 5% were bisexual, and 32% chose not to reveal their orientation. For marital status, 3% of ad placers were married, 47% were single, and 50% did not reveal their marital status.

Academic information. In terms of academic information, the majority of ad placers who revealed their academic year were either freshmen, seniors, or graduate students. Although 59% of ad placers did not reveal their academic year, 10% of all ad placers were freshmen, 5% were sophomores, 5% were juniors, 9% were seniors, and 11% were graduate students. Only 4% of the ad placers were members of Greek organizations.

Physical information. Ad placers were more likely to provide information about their own ages, with 75% revealing their age. The range of stated ages was between 17 and 43 (M = 21.7, SD = 4.87). Only 28% of the ad placers stated an age preference for their prospective partners.