Student’s Research on Dating at BYU Uncovers Surprising Data

This article was originally written by Laurajane Blaser for The Digital Universe. The following is an excerpt. 

Bradley Anderson spent more than 200 hours this summer analyzing data, and it wasn’t for a class.

Anderson, a BYU student from Tacoma, Washington, studying international relations and Japanese, created a Qualtrics survey about dating and distributed it through Facebook. He hoped the survey would answer his own questions about the dating culture at BYU.

“I asked one of my friends on a date, and she said she’d been here for a year and a half and had not been asked on a single date her entire time here. And that just really surprised me,” Anderson said. So he started asking questions about the dating environment at BYU, eventually leading him toward the survey from which he could collect quantifiable information.

“I found that everyone else here thought that there’s a weird dating culture here, and it wasn’t just me,” Anderson said.

Mark Ogletree, an associate professor in the Department of Church History and Doctrine, teaches marriage and family classes and regularly asks his students what they think of the dating atmosphere at BYU.

“Just what I hear from students, there is room for improvement,” Ogletree said. “I’m seeing a lot of hanging out, that’s still alive and well. A lot of students are not dating. If a guy asks a girl out formally, then there’s a panic.”

Read Blaser’s full article at universe.byu.edu.