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Mass media: effects research - uses and gratifications
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Mass media: effects research - uses and gratifications
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The choices which people make are motivated by the desire to satisfy (or 'gratify') a range of needs. Hence the uses and gratifications approach is concerned to identify how people use the media to gratify their needs.
Generally, the needs which audiences seek to gratify are taken to be as summarized by Denis McQuail, namely:
As McQuail points out, it's very difficult to connect a particular need with a particular type of media content, 'since media use may be considered to supply at one time or another all the benefits named'. In the sections which follow, you will find a brief discussion of each of the needs mentioned and some brief suggestions as to how the media might be used to gratify them. However, you should bear in mind that those are only suggestions.
Research has shown that a distinction needs to be made between ritualistic and instrumental media use. Instrumental TV viewing involves using TV
in a purposive fashion to satisfy certain needs and may direct the viewer towards specific areas of television content which can best provide whatever it is he or she is looking for from television. Ritualistic use of television, on the other hand, tends to embody broader sets of needs such as to be entertained or amused, to relax or to be aroused, which are less often associated with watching particular types of programmes.
(Gunter and Svennevig (1987) p. 57)
Uses and gratifications research has developed in a variety of different directions over the years. At present it begins to look as if effects research and uses and gratifications are beginning to combine. Jensen and Rosengren summarise these new developments thus:
recent 'uses and effects research' has been able to show in some detail how media use of particular content types by particular categories of individuals under particular conditions calls forth effects of particular types, which in its turn calls forth mass media use of a particular type - and so on, in long, perhaps never-ending spirals of uses and effects.
Jensen & Rosengren (1994)
Surveillance
Personal identity
Personal relationships
Diversion
Criticism of uses and gratifications research
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