Shifting partnership ideals with online technologies among unmarried women in India

Abstract

This study complements existing scholarship in family sociology and digital demography by investigating the role of digital technologies in shaping partnership ideals among unmarried women in India. We build on the premise that, by means of faster communication, effective information dissemination, and reciprocal exchange of norms and ideals, recurrent exposure to globalized cultural scripts through the Internet may shape family-related outcomes such as views and opinions regarding different aspects of family life. Leveraging new data from a primary survey of unmarried, partnered women living in cities across twenty states, we find that daily Internet use is positively and significantly associated with modern partnership ideals, measured as secularized views on the choice of a partner, the importance of marriage, partner preferences, and views about love marriage. Moreover, we show that accessing the Internet independently—vis-à-vis through a shared device—is what matters the most, and that results are stronger among high-educated individuals. We assess the selectivity of the sample by conducting subgroup analyses and replicating our findings on the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2019–2021. Lastly, we offer evidence that these findings can be deemed causal, complementing our results with an instrumental-variable approach leveraging digital geographical information. Our findings reveal that digital technologies may be gradually contributing to shifting views about marriage and family formation, even in a context such as India, which has traditionally exhibited strong resistance to modernization forces, at least in the realm of the family.