Suchergebnisse

This investigation of the five-factor model of personality as a correlate of mass media use was designed to validate key links in a basic model of the uses and gratifications paradigm. Survey data collected from 219 university students who kept diaries of time spent using the mass media and participating in nonmediated communication activities were submitted to canonical correlation analysis. Minutes devoted to TV viewing, radio listening, pleasure reading, and movie attendance were correlated with the five personality traits of the NEO-PI—neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The strongest relationships for mass media use were between openness and pleasure reading, extroversion and negative pleasure reading, and openness and negative TV viewing. Individuals who scored higher on extroversion and agreeableness exhibited a preference for nonmediated activities, especially conversation.

Employing a uses and gratifications paradigm, four individual differences — sensation seeking, religiosity, hostility and family cohesion — were examined simultaneously as correlates of drug use and television viewing and used to test four corresponding models of addiction: medical/disease, moral, compensatory and enlightenment. Not only were alcohol and marijuana use inversely correlated with time spent and motives for watching television, but sensation seeking, which was positively correlated with drug use was negatively correlated with television viewing. Conversely, religiosity was positively correlated with television viewing and negatively with drug use. With these results, the author concluded that the medical/disease model of television addiction lacked empirical support, and other models emphasizing personal control and responsibility appeared more appropriate for developing strategies to regulate excessive or compulsive television viewing.

Data from three computer-administered panel studies at the University of North Carolina were analyzed to explore relationships between motivations for television viewing and six individual-differences measures, including shyness, loneliness, self-esteem, and three measures of social support. Viewing motivations were supposed to be related to needs arising from two distinct sources: (a) social compensation, which included companionship, pass time, habit, and escape motivations, and (b) mood management, which included relaxation, entertainment, arousal, and information motivations. The results based on a sample of 290 undergraduates revealed that self-esteem and the three other social-support variables correlated positively with the mood-management viewing motive and negatively with the social-compensation viewing motive. Also as hypothesized, shyness and loneliness correlated positively with the social-compensation viewing motive.

Although Shannon and Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication has had a profound impact on the development of communication research, few scholars have adapted Shannon's concepts to their research questions. The authors argue that the failure to recognize the difference between the two fundamental orientations in Shannon's theory—the relationship between source and destination and the technical characteristics of transmission channels—has retarded the use of Shannon's concepts, especially his measure of information. Taking care to differentiate between these two aspects of information theory, the authors review the small body of empirical research inspired by Shannon's theory. They find that Shannon's entropy measure is especially useful in the study of human systems because it permits researchers to analyze categorical data using quantitative statistical tools.