Science Connection's "success rate": data!  

Journalists often ask "what's your success rate?". Well, how do you define success? To us, a successful member is one who is pleased he joined, for whatever reason. The most frequent positive feedback we get is that members are "meeting some interesting people" or "have not found the one yet, but have made some good friends". Undoubtedly, enjoyable contacts and new friendships are the most frequent positive outcome. (Some members report that their membership has been worthwhile just because they enjoy reading member comments or reading about other members.)

Finding 'true love' is of course a rare event — life would be pretty chaotic if we were encountering true loves every day. Nevertheless, it does of course happen through Science Connection, and we have some records on it and its precursors.

This information is only obtained when members volunteer it, so naturally, it is incomplete. Science Connection members make their own contacts and connections, so they are less likely to report success than with singles services where staff or matching algorithms do the match-making.

Table:  Number of records of Science Connection "matches", by relationship category. Each record involves two members.

Relationship category	Number of records
married	87
engaged	69
married or engaged		156
"serious relationship" (includes cohabiting)	282
married, engaged, or serious relationship		438
dating/strong interest*	3051 (213 2)	305
TOTAL	743	743
couple with one or more resulting offspring	11 (14 babies)

* Data on dating are incomplete, as we only began recording that information in August 2000. We thus provide a corrected value (1) that uses the relative frequencies of relationship categories since August 2000 to estimate the number of reported cases of "dating/serious interest" prior to August 2000. The uncorrected figure (2) is shown in parenthesis. (Even since 2000, we often forget to record it when members mention that they're seeing a fellow member.)

Further statistics

Total number of individuals who have joined Science Connection = 15,245
Number of members with multiple match records (i.e. with matches with more than one other member) = 26
Number of members who have formed a relationship (any category) with a fellow member = ((2 x 743) - 26) = 1460
Preceding total as a percentage of members who have joined = 9.58 %
Number of members who have become married or engaged or entered a serious relationship with another member = 850
Preceding total as a percent of members who have joined = 5.58 %

Total number of couples (in our Matches database) for which both identities are known = 290
Number of couples in the same state or province = 79 (33%)
Number of couples in different states/provinces = 163 (67%)

Where the ages of both members of a couple are known:
Average age of men = 48.97 (N=289)
Average age of women = 45.74 (N=289)
Difference: Men are on average 3.23 years older than women

Notes

1. Our calculation of the total number of individuals who have joined Science Connection has corrected for (subtracted) cases in which the same individual joined more than once.
2. The category "serious relationships" may include some marriages and engagements that were not explicitly referred to when the member communicated his or her good news.
3. Again, these data are incomplete. There are certainly more cases than are reported. There are some matches that we only hear of inadvertently from third parties, sometimes years after the match occurred.
4. The degree by which matches are under-reported is very likely greater for "dating/serious interest" than for other relationship categories.
5. The number of resulting offspring ("Science Connection: The Next Generation") that we have heard about is likely a small portion of the actual number.
6. This report is generated from the current database.

Remarks

We are surprised that so many matches involve members in different states or provinces. We wonder whether matches involving members who live nearby are more under-reported than long-distance relationships.

There has been much discussion our Newsletter member comment section about the common phenomenon of men stating a preference for younger women. We find it interesting therefore that couples who have met through Science Connection are quite close in age (less than 3 years apart) on average.

These data on minimum success rates for Science Connection members compare very favourably with those of other online singles groups, for which limited data indicate much lower success rates.

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