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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Chapter 23
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
• In the early days of mass media, Mass Society Theory—the idea that average people are
helpless victims of powerful mass media—defined the relationship between audiences and
the media they consumed.
o This notion was eventually discredited, in large part because social science—and
simple observation—could not confirm the notion of all powerful media and media
messages.
• Limited effects theories conceptualize media influence as limited or minimized by some
aspects of individual audience members’ personal or social lives.
• The Individual Differences Perspective sees media’s power as shaped by personal factors
such as intelligence and self-esteem.
• The Social Categories Model views media’s power as limited by audience members’
associations and group affiliations.
• The first (Mass Society) suggests that people simply are not smart or strong enough to
Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch (1974) presented a systematic and comprehensive
articulation of audience members’ role in the mass communication process.
o While granting the media some effects, the theory gives the audience more
credibility and holds that people actively seek out specific media and specific content
to generate specific gratifications.
o Theorists in Uses and Gratifications view people as active because they are able to
examine and evaluate various types of media to accomplish communication goals.
II. Assumptions of Uses and Gratifications Theory
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
• Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) provides a framework for understanding when and
how individual media consumers become more or less active and the consequences of that
increased or decreased involvement.
• Many of the assumptions of UGT were clearly articulated by the founders of the approach
(Katz et al., 1974).
• They contend that there are five basic assumptions of Uses and Gratifications Theory.
o The audience is active and its media use is goal oriented.
o The initiative in linking need gratification to a specific medium choice rests with the
audience member.
o Personal relationships occur when people substitute the media for companionship.
o Personal identity refers to the ways to reinforce an individual’s values.
o Surveillance is information about how media will help an individual accomplish
something.
• Uses and Gratifications’ second assumption links need gratification to a specific medium
choice that rests with the audience member.
o Because people are active agents, they take initiative.
o The implication is that audience members have a great deal of autonomy in the mass
communication process.
• The third assumption—that media compete with other sources for need satisfaction—
means that the media and their audiences do not exist in a vacuum.
o Both are part of the larger society, and the relationship between media and audiences
is influenced by that society.
• The fourth assumption of UGT relates to a methodological issue that has to do with
researchers’ ability to collect reliable and accurate information from media consumers.
o Early research in Uses and Gratifications included questioning respondents about
why they consumed particular media.
• The fifth assumption is also less about the audience than it is about those who study it.
o It asserts that researchers should suspend value judgments linking the audience’s
needs to specific media or content.
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
III. Stages of Uses and Gratifications Research
• The first stage of UG research (prior to the formulation of the theory itself), consisted of
acknowledging that people can and do actively participate in the mass communication
process.
• Herta Herzog (1944) sought to classify the reasons people engage in different forms of
media behavior.
• Wanting to understand why women were attracted to radio soap operas, Herzog
interviewed dozens of soap opera fans and identified three major types of gratification.
o First, some people enjoyed the dramas because of the emotional release they found in
listening to the problems of others.
o Second, listeners seemed to engage in wishful thinking.
o Finally, some people felt that they could learn from these programs because “if you
listen to these programs and something turns up in your life, you would know what to
do about it.”
• Herzog’s work was critical to developing UGT because she was the first published
researcher to provide an in-depth examination of media gratifications.
• Fraction of selection was Schramm’s idea of how media choices are made. The
expectation of reward is divided by the effort required.
o Schramm sought to make clear that audience members judge the level of reward
(gratification) they expect from a given medium or message against how much effort
they must make to secure that reward—an important component of what would later
become known as the Uses and Gratifications perspective.
• Researchers found categories of needs associated with acquiring information or
knowledge, pleasure, status, strengthening relationships, and relax.
• In the third stage, Uses and Gratifications researchers have been interested in linking
specific reasons for media use with variables such as needs, goals, benefits, the
consequences of media use, and individual factors.
o Researchers are working to make the theory more explanatory and predictive.
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
• Rubin and Step (2000) have examined the relationship of motivation, interpersonal
attraction, and parasocial interaction (the relationship individuals feel they have with
people they know only through the media) to listening to public affairs talk radio.
• Currently, researchers using UGT are interested in how the theory operates with respect to
newer media.
IV. Media Effects
• The history of UGT has much to do with how researchers shifted and changed their
positions on the media effects.
o Researchers moved from a position where they saw the media as very powerful to
one where media effects were seen as more limited.
o Uses and Gratifications Theory moved even further to the position of the active
audience and less powerful media.
o However, there was controversy about how in control audience members might be
under the theory.
• The failure of researchers in traditional Uses and Gratifications to consider the possibility
of important media effects led the authors of the original work to chastise their colleagues
11 years later by noting that a “vulgar gratificationism” (Blumler, 1985, p. 259) should be
purged from the theory.
o It was not the theorists’ intention to imply that audience members are always totally
free in either the uses they make of media or the gratifications they seek from them.
o The world in which media consumers live shapes them just as surely as they shape it,
and content does have intended meaning.
• Blumler and his colleagues point to a second set of premises that make clear their belief
that people’s use of media and the gratifications they seek from it are inextricably
intertwined with the world in which they live.
• Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch (1974) originally wrote in developing
UGT that “social situations” in which people find themselves can be “involved in the
generation of media-related needs” (p. 27) in five ways.
o Social situations can produce tensions and conflicts, leading to pressure for their
easement through the consumption of media.
o Social situations can create an awareness of problems that demand attention,
information about which may be sought in the media.
o Social situations can impoverish real-life opportunities to satisfy certain needs, and
the media can serve as substitutes or supplements.
o Social situations often elicit specific values, and their affirmation and reinforcement
can be facilitated by the consumption of related media materials.
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
o Social situations demand familiarity with media; these demands must be met to
sustain membership in specific social groups.
• Uses and Gratifications Theory and its assumptions gained acceptance for a number of
reasons.
o Limited effects researchers began to run out of things to study.
desirable and intentionally set out to achieve those effects.
▪ If this is so, what does this say about limited effects?
o While many negative effects were documented by limited effects researchers such as
the relationship between viewing mediated violence and subsequent aggressive
behavior, positive uses of media were left unexamined.
V. Key Concepts: The Audience as Active
• The active audience is a variable concept focused on an audience engaging with the media
on a voluntary basis, motivated by their needs and goals.
• Blumler (1979) offers several suggestions as to the kinds of audience activity in which
media consumers could engage.
o Utility is using the media to accomplish specific tasks.
▪ The media have uses for people, and people can put media to those uses.
o Intentionality occurs when people’s prior motivations determine their consumption
response to advertising campaigns.
• UGT also distinguishes between activity and activeness to understand better the degrees of
audience activity.
o Activity refers to what the media consumer does.
o Activeness refers to how much freedom the audience really has in the face of mass
media.
• Activeness is relative.
o Some people are active participants in the mass communication process; others are
more passive.
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
• Activeness is also individually variable.
o A person can be inactive at times and then become quite active.
o One’s level of activeness often varies by time of day and type of content.
VI. Uses and Gratifications and the Internet, Social Media, and Cell Phones
• New media will continue to change people’s future.
• Many researchers believe that UGT will be able to explain the ways that people use the
Internet, SMS, as well as cell phone technology, and other media.
variety of media, the exact list of gratifications will change based on the specific
medium.
• LaRose and Eastin (2004) suggest that Uses and Gratifications Theory can also be
enhanced by the addition of some new variables such as expected activity outcomes and
social outcomes.
• A few studies have examined how new media satisfy users’ gratifications compared to
traditional media.
VII. Integration, Critique, and Closing
• Uses and Gratifications had its greatest influence in the 1970s and 1980s.
• The limited effects paradigm held sway at the time, and media theorists needed a
framework within which they could discuss the obvious presence of media effects without
straying too far from disciplinary orthodoxy.
o UGT is quite straightforward when discussing how people use newspapers or
magazines to come to some specific decision or judgment.
• Denis McQuail (1984) believes that the theory suffers from a lack of theoretical
coherence.
o He notes that the theory relies too heavily on the functional use of media, because
there are times when the media can be reckless.
B. Utility
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
• If the key concepts of the theory are shaky, then the theory may not have full utility.
• Yet, it should be noted that some UGT scholars believe that because most of the
research employed self-report instruments, it renders the audience member as less
dynamic than if personal observations were used (Roggiero, 2000).
• The theory does not take into consideration the fact that individuals may not have
considered all available choices in media consumption.
C. Heurism
• The research has spanned several decades, and the theory has framed a number of
research studies.
• In addition to the early pioneers Katz, Blumler, Gurevitch, and their colleagues, others
have employed the theory and its thinking in their research on gay and bisexual men,
information sources related to college students, texting and public health emergency
messaging, and digital photo sharing on Facebook.
Classroom Activities
1. Media Consumption Diary
Objective: To encourage students to become more aware of their media consumption
habits
Materials: None
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
2. Passive or Active?
Objective: To encourage students to debate different views of media consumption
Materials: None
• The definition of terms such as mass media, active, and goal oriented
• The view of human behavior
• The criteria used to evaluate a theory
3. Uses and Gratifications and The Simpsons
Objective: To help students identify and apply the concepts from Uses and Gratifications
Theory (Note: This activity can be used to review the concepts from both this theory and
cultivation theory.)
Materials: Episode 7F06 of The Simpsons, “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge” (second
season)
Directions:
a. Have students briefly review the theory’s major concepts.
b. Show the episode, and have students jot down possible connections to the theory and
its concepts as they watch the show.
c. Engage the class in a discussion of the following issues/topics, encouraging students
to use vocabulary from the theory and its framework in order to make sense of what
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Chapter 23: Uses and Gratifications Theory
• How do Bart and Lisa calculate the fraction of selection for watching Itchy and
Scratchy throughout the show? At first, it’s highly rewarding because it’s very
entertaining, and it requires little effort because it’s on their television. It
requires more effort when Bart and Lisa are not allowed to watch it at home,
but the reward still outweighs the effort; when the program becomes boring,
they are allowed to watch it once again, so it does not require much effort. But
since it is no longer rewarding, they seek out other things to do.
• Is there any evidence to support the assumptions underlying this theory (e.g.,
active and goal-oriented audience, media compete with other sources, value
judgments)?
• What kinds of needs seem to be met for the kids by watching Itchy and