Practices of Mobile Dating Apps Usage: The Case of Tinder

This paper provides a complex description of the practices of usage the Tinder online dating application. The topicality and motivation of the study lies in the fact that despite the high popularity of Tinder, it still remains poorly studied. Most of the papers on the usage of Tinder are devoted to two topics: the motivations for using the application and the practices of self-representation. At the same time, most of the significant using practices remains unexplored. Of particular relevance to the study is that it is carried out in Russia, where at the moment there is only one published work on the practices of using Tinder, which is again written on the practices of self-representation. The goal of this study is to create a complex and complete description of the practices of using the Tinder application. The empirical base of the research is 19 in-depth interviews with Tinder users and the results of observation the user swiping process. Informants were recruited using the snowball sampling. The base contains 9 male informants, 10 female informants, 4 informants define themselves as non-heterosexuals. The results of the study allow a complex description of the practices of using the application. As part of the study, the chronology of use includes the following steps: profile construction, setting search parameters, swiping, match, and further communication of the pair. Each of the stages are described in detail and create a basic picture of the practices of using the Tinder application.