Dating apps and the effects on Self Esteem

I Have Clout. Swipe Right: Dating Apps and Implications on Self-Esteem and Body Image

The paper ‘I have Clout. Swipe Right: Dating Apps and Implications on Self-Esteem and
Body Image’ (Shimokobe T et al.) as the name siggestes, tries to find a relationship between
Self esteem and dating apps. It begins with an explanation of what dating apps are, talks
about papers which have previously studied the effects of such apps on mental health reated
issues and so on. It then goes on to talk about the method it used which was a likert like
semantic scale on google forms and its participants which consisted of 133 self volunteered
participants. Approximately 71 percent of these participants identified as female, 27 percent
identified as male and 0.8 percent identified their gender as non binary. All of the participants
were college students and a considerable number of them (99), were from California
Polytechnic State University. The researchers had also conducted an initial pilot study on 8
respondents. After the study, they were unable to find any conclusive evidence to suggest any
relationship between self esteem and dating apps

Body image and psychosocial functioning among men and women

This paper talks about various body image related issues and self esteem and how they can be
impacted by Dating apps. It begins by talking about other research which talk about how
sexualisation and objectification can lead to eating disorders. It goes on to talk about its
participants which comprised of 913 women and 234 men. It also elaborates how they took
participants from different demographics and also took into account how frequently the
participants used these apps. They specify the things the tested and the scales they used, for
example, they measured body satisfaction using the 17 item body factor index and the 7 item
body factor index and Self esteem using the Rosenberg Self Esteem scale (RSE). This paper
was able to conclude that the body image, body satisfaction and other body image related
issues were negative effected by the usage of dating apps while self esteem was not.

Comparison and Contrast

While both the paper had similar variables, i.e. self esteem and usage of dating apps,
because of the abstract and the hypothesesm it was easy for one to identify that both the
papers had a different perspective when it came to the topic. The Shimokobe paper in
particular mentioned another paper several times and cited similarities. This was the paper by
Stella Ward which talked a lot about how apps are simply a medium and the true contributor
to self esteem is the search for romantic relationships and not the app itself. On the other
hand, The Strubel and Petri paper began with references to various social media platforms
like facebook and tried to draw comparisions between it and Tinder citing various papers
which talked about how uploading pictures online can have an impact on self esteem.
Yet another interesting perspective that differed between the Shimokobe paper and
the Strubel and Petri paper was how they treated gender. One great lack of the Strubel & Petri
paper was that they completely ignored non binary people. However, they did take into
account the fact that self esteem and the factors or the way in which self esteem develops in
men and women is different. The Shimokobe paper on the other hand focused included non
binary people. However, they did not consider the fact that gender impacts self esteem and
body image and simply studied self esteem altogether.
Ultimately, the differing perspectives and how they impact the methods of the two
papers helps one see that how even while studying almost identical variables, how much
nuance there is and how the littlest thing can impact the overall conclusions of the paper.
Both the papers found results they has hypothesized even though they are conflicting as the
way they looked at the variables was completely different.

Conclusion
The biggest difference between the Strubel & Petrie paper and the Shimokobe paper
is that the Shimokobe paper did not focus on a singular app but just the use of all apps while
the Strubel paper focused on users of Tinder. This helped them narrow their research down
but also test more outcomes such as Body satisfaction, Body surveillance, Body shame and
along with self esteem. It helped the Strubel and Petrie paper find out how exactly these apps
can impact self esteem as both the papers did conclude to an extent that since dating apps are
swiped based, a lot of the matching functions boils down to the images, especially on Tinder.
Another thing that helped the Strubel and Petrie paper was the fact that they used various
scales for each of their dependant variables. Their dependant variables were Body
Satisfaction, Body Shame, Appearance Comparisions, Internalizations, Body surveillance and
finally self esteem. One can conclude that their paper was not simply about self esteem but all
the variables helped understand and separate self esteem from other body image related
issues. In contrast to this, the Shimokobe paper simply used a semantic likert like scale using
google forms. Another major difference between the two papers is the selection of
participants. The Shimokobe paper ended up using random sampling as the questionnaire was
optional and as the topic was a sensitive one it had to be disclosed. This could mean that
people who have negative feelings about these apps could’ve chosen to not participate in the
questionnaire while the people who did enjoy their experiences on dating apps may have
participated more. The Strubel paper on the other hand conducted their research on a secure
website called Qualtrics. While their participants were from just 2 universities, their research
methods, especially studying people from different genders separately helped get a more
conclusive and reliable result as gender can have a huge impact on body image and self
esteem. For the methods and the overall effort and throught that the Strubel paper put into
their research, I related to and was more convinced by their research.

Bibliography
Strubel, J., & Petrie, T. A. (2017, March 8). Love me tinder: Body image and psychosocial
functioning among men and women. Body Image. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144516303254.

Shimokabe, T., et al. I Have Clout. Swipe Right: Dating Apps and Implications
on Self-Esteem and Body Image.Retrieved September 30, 2021, from
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