Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Dating back to work done in Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research in the 1940s, media uses and gratifications (U&G) research represents one of the oldest and largest continuous programs of research in the field of communication. The tradition represents hundreds of research projects since the 1940s examining the reasons why people use mass media including →  Radio , →  Television , film (→  Cinema ), print media, and the →  Internet. U&G has consistently been one of the most frequently published mass communication theoretical perspectives in communication journals over the past 50 years. The product of this massive research effort has been a large set of taxonomies of media use motives; research linking those motives to antecedent variables (e.g., social factors, personality) and media use, along with some consequences (effects) of that use; and an extensive theoretical discussion and critique. Many scholars hold that U&G represents a research perspective that is separate from the →  Media Effects tradition (→  Communication as a Field and Discipline ; Exposure to Communication Content ; Media Effects, History of ). In their 1974 collection, →  Katz and Blumler , along with Gurevitch, provided the germinal theoretical description of the U&G →  paradigm , stating that U&G research is concerned with “the social and psychological origins of needs, which ... log in or subscribe to read full text