How I met your mother
Via Jolisa Gracewood on Twitter, a graph from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld on how people met their partners (click to embiggen)
Obviously the proportion who met online has increased — in the old days there weren’t many people on line. It’s still dramatic how fast the change happened, considering that ‘the year September never ended’, when AOL subscribers gained access to Usenet, was only 1993. It’s also notable how everything else except ‘in a bar or restaurant’ has gone down.
Since this is StatsChat you should be asking how they got the data: it was a reasonably good survey. There’s a research paper, too (PDF).
You should also be worrying about the bump in ‘online’ in the mid-1980s. It’s ok. The paper says “This bump corresponds to two respondents. These two respondents first met their partners in the 1980s without the assistance of the Internet, and then used the Internet to reconnect later”
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »