Dating-partner preferences among a group of inner-city African-American high school students

The present study examines a set of characteristics that students may (or may not) value in a dating partner. A total of 80 inner-city high school students indicated how important they perceived certain qualities to be in a person they would like to date. Respondents were instructed to check the most appropriate category (very important, somewhat important, or not important) beside a list of 12 phrases. In order to determine meaningful patterns, a rank-ordering of mean values and a rarely used multidimensional scaling model were employed to further understand this widely researched aspect of dating. The rank-ordering indicates relationships between the students and attributes, while the scaling model reflects patterns between the rated attributes only. The results are in contrast to the previous literature regarding dating-partner preferences among African-American high school students.