Saudi Arabian Parents' Perception of Online Marital Matchmaking Technologies

Abstract

Finding a date or a spouse online is usually considered an individualistic endeavor in Western cultures. This presents a challenge for collectivist non-Western cultures such as Saudi Arabia where choosing a spouse is viewed as a union of two families with parents of both spouses being heavily involved. Our work aims to investigate how Saudi Arabian parents view the utilization of technology by their young adults to seek potential spouses online. We report our findings of interviews conducted with 16 Saudi Arabian parents (8 fathers, 6 mothers and 1 couple). We generate qualitative themes that provide insights about how parents wanted to preserve their values, integrate technology into the traditional process and protect their young adults from potential harms. These themes lead to implications for designing suitable marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and opportunities for future work.

Dating Apps Are Used for More Than Dating

“…We restricted the survey to those living in the US because, one, the survey was piloted with US citizens and had question-wording tailored to their suggestions. Two, evidence of PNAs being used for myriad interaction goals has tended to come from studies of users in particular countries (e.g., the US [37,56], Canada [47], Belgium [56,57]), and we could not assume that these patterns of use are applicable globally, particularly in regions that have persistent cultural stigma around PNA-use [2,6]. While we recognize that this limits generalizability of the findings to regions outside of the US, we wanted to ensure that our survey captured responses from PNA users with myriad interaction goals.…”

“…Given the years of research into PNA-use for dating [e.g., 22,26], equally in-depth research of PNA-use for platonic goals is relatively lacking (recent exceptions include [37,38,47]). Another path for future work is exploration of how selfpresentation and evaluation of interaction goals varies across geographic areas, particularly ones with persistent stigma around PNA-use [2,6] and common associations of PNA-use with sex [15]. The present study focused only on users in the US, which limits generalizability to other regions.…”