Swiping between worlds: anticipatory family filtering, face-work and gendered reputation in Vietnamese Generation Z university students’ use of dating applications

This study examined how Vietnamese Generation Z university students negotiate intimacy, reputation, and family authority in dating applications. Using an interpretivist, social-constructionist design, we interviewed 25 students in five Vietnamese cities and analysed the material through theory-informed reflexive thematic analysis, using face negotiation theory, Goffman’s dramaturgy, and affordance theory as sensitising concepts. We constructed five themes: multi-audience face-work and layered concealment; friendship-first framing and the cultivation of tình cảm; gendered reputational risk and women’s constrained sexual agency; the cultural appropriation of platform affordances; and anticipatory family filtering, in which participants report screening profiles against anticipated parental approval before any interaction. We propose the Anticipatory Face Management Model of Digitally Mediated Romance as a dataset-grounded account of how these mechanisms combine. The analysis locates family authority at the interface rather than after a relationship has been formed, and situates this finding in the regionally and generationally uneven ways Vietnamese family authority and sexual respectability are lived, rather than as part of a homogeneous ‘Confucian culture’.