The Role of Gay Identity Confusion and Outness in Sex-Seeking on Mobile Dating Apps Among Men Who Have Sex With Men: A Conditional Process Analysis

ABSTRACT

Mobile dating apps are now a popular platform for men who have sex with men (MSM) to connect with others. Based on the uses and gratifications (U&G) theory, this study explores the relationship between sex-seeking and the number of casual sex partners met through MSM-based mobile dating apps (Grindr, Jack’d, and SCRUFF). The conditional process analysis (N = 401) shows that this relationship was significant and was mediated by the intensity of app use. That is, sex-seeking indirectly affected the number of casual sex partners through the intensity of app use. Furthermore, gay identity confusion and outness to the world moderated this indirect effect: it was stronger when the user was either more confused about his sexuality or was less out to the world. This research introduces an alternative way to incorporate psychographics variables into the U&G framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Conditional process analysis
• dating app
• gay
• Grindr
• hook-up
• Jack’d
• men who have sex with men
• MSM
• SCRUFF
• sex
• uses and gratifications

Notes

^1. This research set out to use Jack’d to recruit participants because Jack’d allows the researcher to pick any location in the world and to reach other users in that location. This means that a geographically stratified sample is possible. The researcher planned to randomly send out 20 invitations to people in the largest city in each state and Washington, DC. However, when these hundreds of invitation messages were sent out across the country, the app classified these messages as spam and deleted the researcher’s account. Thus the current, less representative sampling was used.

^2. An alternative mediation can be tested by treating intensity of app use as the independent variable and sex-seeking as the mediator. Using conditional process analysis, this mediation was found to be significant (ab = .045, SE = .009, 95% CI [.028, .066]). This mediation can be interpreted as the more time and mental effort a user invests in a dating app, the stronger the motive for him to use the app to seek sex, and the more casual sex partners he meets on the app. Structural equation modeling can be used to test which mediating model better fits the data. I thank a reviewer for pointing out this alternative.