WSJ says 236-a-day claim may be fairy tales

The Wall Street Journal asks Harris Interactive, True.com, Match.com, PlentyOfFish, and Dr. Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony, where they got their statistics in the first-ever news article that is skeptic to dating site success claims, dated 29 July 2009.

The Conclusion: No site except eHarmony is sure of what they are talking about.

When first confronting this measurement, eHarmony faced some daunting numbers. Since so few Americans — fewer than 2% — get married in any given year, calling households randomly to find enough to answer such a survey would be prohibitively expensive. Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony, estimates that it would have taken 1.75 million phone calls to get a big enough sample.

So instead, Harris used a massive online panel to recruit respondents much more efficiently. But such surveys introduce potential bias, George Terhanian, Harris’s president for global solutions, says. Those answering questions about online dating and marriages may be more likely to spend time online and share personal details there, possible prerequisites for turning online courtship into matrimony.

Harris takes extensive steps to attempt to correct for these biases, and … Dr. Gonzaga says eHarmony was also conservative in its calculation, for instance by assuming that no one over 54 married because of the site. And he says the site received reports of 5,000 marriages among confirmed members during the year covered by the survey, which means if just one in eight married members shared their marital bliss with their matchmaker, the eHarmony number checks out.

For these reasons, Dr. Gonzaga says he is confident in the Harris survey, though he adds that at first “I was doubtful myself.” The site is planning to work with Harris to update the number later this year.