This evening I participated in a study run by an M.I.T doctoral student at the Media Lab. I would have liked more time to talk with her, but basically she is studying dating. Part of the study was to set up a speed dating session with volunteers and to have complete surveys before, during, and after the session.
The basic idea of speed dating is that you have men and women in the same age group talk with each other for a brief period of time (usually 3-8 minutes). After the time is up you mark down weather or not you would like to see the person you just talked with again. At the end of the evening you submit your list and the men and women that both want to see each other again are given each other’s contact information. This trend is becoming more popular and many organization host them through online companies.
I’ve been curious about this style of meeting people for a while and this was being run for free, so I figured “What the hell.” The group was small 6 men and 5 women. My impression is that there is usually 3-4 times this number at a normal speed dating gathering. We had three minutes to talk and I was surprise to see that this really is enough time to know if you would like to talk with the person further. There were two women that I would like to see again and I talked with another man who runs a matching board at Harvard. He wanted to test the waters for bring BU into the fold.
The first survey we took was at the beginning of the evening. We were asked to rate ourselves based off the average person on a scale form 1 to 10 (ten being the best rating) on qualities such as education, attractiveness, outgoingness, intelligence, and earning potential. In between our talks we filled out more surveys asking similar questions about the person we just talked with, but adding a confidence interval (how sure of our rating were we), asking us if we would contact this person (yes, no, or maybe), and if we thought they would contact us.
The experience was a bit nerve racking, but fun. I don’t know if I will do it again, though I am glad that I tried it out. I am interested in what kind of data analysis the woman running study is going to use. She will have a very complicated data set and will need to conduct many of these sessions to get any significant trends.
Gah, i have always been horrified by the thought of participating in one of those sessions. It is really cool to hear your experience, though!
Comment by sciencegrrl — March 17, 2004 @ 9:18 am