Some mass communications scholars have contended that uses and gratifications is not a rigorous social science theory. In this article, I argue just the opposite, and any attempt to speculate on the future direction of mass communication theory must seriously include the uses and gratifications approach. In this article, I assert that the emergence of computer-mediated communication has revived the significance of uses and gratifications. In fact, uses and gratifications has always provided a cutting-edge theoretical approach in the initial stages of each new mass communications medium: newspapers, radio and television, and now the Internet. Although scientists are likely to continue using traditional tools and typologies to answer questions about media use, we must also be prepared to expand our current theoretical models of uses and gratifications. Contemporary and future models must include concepts such as interactivity, demassification, hypertextuality, and asynchroneity. Researchers must also be willing to explore interpersonal and qualitative aspects of mediated communication in a more holistic methodology.

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Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century

A growing body of research indicates that entertainment-education programming can be an effective way to deliver prosocial and health messages. Some have even speculated that entertainment-education may be more effective than overtly persuasive messages in certain circumstances. Despite empirical advances in this area, more work is needed to understand fully what makes entertainment-education unique from a message-processing standpoint. To this end, the present article has three objectives. First, the article examines the involvement with narrative storylines and characters that is fostered by entertainment programming. This includes a much-needed explication and separation of several related constructs, such as identification, parasocial interaction, similarity, and others. Second, the article reviews and synthesizes existing theories that have addressed entertainment-education message processing. Third, the article builds on these theories, presenting an expanded theoretical framework. A set of propositions is advanced and directions for future research are discussed. In total, the article offers a clarification of existing concepts that are critical to the study of entertainment-education, a synthesis of relevant theory, and a set of propositions to guide future research in entertainment-education message effects.

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Toward a Theory of Entertainment Persuasion: Explaining the Persuasive Effects of Entertainment‐Education Messages

Understanding audience segmentation: From elite and mass to omnivore and univore

Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology

In this Monograph, we report the follow-up of 570 adolescents who had been studied as preschoolers in one of two separate investigations of television use. The primary goal of the study was to determine the long-term relations between preschool television viewing and adolescent achievement, behavior, and attitudes. Using a telephone interview and high school transcripts, we assessed adolescent media use; grades in English, science, and math; leisure reading; creativity; aggression; participation in extracurricular activities; use of alcohol and cigarettes; and self-image. In each domain, we tested theories emphasizing the causal role of television content (e.g., social learning, information processing) as contrasted with those theories positing effects of television as a medium, irrespective of content (e.g., time displacement, pacing, interference with language). The results provided much stronger support for content-based hypotheses than for theories emphasizing television as a medium; moreover, the patterns differed for boys and girls. Viewing educational programs as preschoolers was associated with higher grades, reading more books, placing more value on achievement, greater creativity, and less aggression. These associations were more consistent for boys than for girls. By contrast, the girls who were more frequent preschool viewers of violent programs had lower grades than those who were infrequent viewers. These associations held true after taking into account family background, other categories of preschool viewing, and adolescent media use. One hypothesis accounting for the sex differences is that early experiences, such as television viewing, have greater effects when they counteract normative developmental trends and predominant sex-typed socialization influences than when they reinforce them. Adolescents in the study used both television and print media to support ongoing interests. Television content (e.g., entertainment, sports, or world events) predicted extracurricular activities, role models, and body image. The only evidence for possible effects of television as a medium was the positive relation of total viewing to obesity for girls. The medium of television is not homogeneous or monolithic, and content viewed is more important than raw amount. The medium is not the message: The message is.

Early childhood television viewing and adolescent behavior: the recontact study

This essay responds to the individualistic criticism of the uses and gratifications perspective by considering social‐structural conditions that affect media uses and effects, and by proposing an audience‐centered and society‐based framework for examining mass communication processes. The nature of media dependency, the origins of dependency, audience needs and motives, audience‐media‐society relationships, functional alternatives, information seeking, and media effects are discussed as central concepts of the uses and dependency model of mass communication.

The uses and dependency model of mass communication

Media matter: TV use in childhood and adolescence.

Conducted within the frame of the Media Panel Research Program at the University of Lund, Sweden, this study of media deprivation was based on data collected during a Swedish television strike in 1980. The sample consisted of 215 adolescents aged 17 from Vaxjo, a city in southern Sweden. Key concepts within the uses and gratifications approach are discussed. Of special interest to the study are the notions of dependency/affinity with the medium, functional alternatives to media consumption, and motives for using television.

Sven Windahl

Papers

The uses and dependency model of mass communication

Media matter: TV use in childhood and adolescence.

Adolescents without television: A study in media deprivation