Media Effects Research

Summary
• This chapter started with a review of some of the reasons people have for using the media
• With people spending so much time with mass media, questions about the effects of all this time have
occupied the attention of researchers for years
• The major focus of this research is on the displacement hypothesis (the idea that time spent in media use
displaces other activities.
• Some research does indicate that TV viewing displaces social activities, reduces children’s fantasy play,
and leads to obesity and hypertension by reducing physical activity.

Time spent with mass media: reasons and consequences

• Primero el autor plantea un ejemplo de que cuando no existía la radio las personas se preguntaban qué
hacían sus antepasados cuando no había radio, esa misma pregunta ha evolucionado con la llegada
de la tele y luego con la de internet.
• The mass media have had a profound impact on the way people use their time
• Joseph Dominick, defines mass communication as:
o The process by which a complex organization with the aid of one or more machines produces
and transmits public messages that are directed at large, heterogeneous, and scattered
audiences
• Radio and TV certainly continue to fit that conventional. But with computers, the Internet, and smart
phones, what formally counts as “mass communication” is debatable.

The uses and gratifications perspective

• Because individuals react to media content in very different ways, the idea that the media have uniform,
powerful effects on a wide audience fell out of favor. It was only natural that the limited-effects
perspective, which emphasized individual differences, would spawn a new interest in why individuals use
media in the first place.
• Uses and gratifications perspective:
o It focused heavily on individual motivations for media use.

Why do people watch TV?

• Some entries on this list of motivations for media use were developed by Bradley Greenberg in one study
of British children and were replicated along with some additions by Alan Rubin in a later study.
o Learning
§ In order to learn things
§ The data from the uses and gratifications research suggest that children and adults do use
TV in order to deliberately learn things.
§ Many users of smart-phones report that one of the reasons they never want to part with
their device is because of its capacity to find quick answer
o Habit
§ Watching television may be habit-forming
§ TV like a drug encourages behavior that looks like a full-blown addiction. But several later
studies seem to indicate that TV addiction is a real phenomenon.
§ It seems safe to say that there may be a tendency for some individuals to develop a
psychological dependence on TV that resembles addictive behavior in some respects.
o Companionship
§ Many people watch TV because It gives them a sense of connection to other people.
§ People can actually communicate with other people in chat rooms and use e-mail to
keep in touch.
§ The human brain does not easily separate media images from reality. When we see people
on TV, some primitive part of the brain is tricked into thinking that those people are
physically present.
 • Rebecca Rubin refers to the feelings and attachments that people have toward
media characters as parasocial relationships
§ Children clearly form impressions about people presented to them in the media and may
become emotionally attached to some of those people
o Arousal
§ It stimulates them, excites them, and increases their arousal level (heart rate, blood
pressure, sweat, and respiration rate)
§ For other individuals, the natural set point of arousal is lower than their optimal level. As a
result, these people would seek out stimulating and arousing activities.
§ Sensation seekers are individuals who trend to seek out arousing activities. Those high on
sensation seeking express a much greater desire for activities such as skydiving.
§ Several studies show that high sensation seekers prefer to watch horror films. One of the
reasons that some children seem to seek out media content that is violent or frightening
may have to do with the need for arousal.
§ Experiment: “scary sharks” or a video about “bunnies”
• The children who had scored high on sensation seeking were much more likely to
choose to watch the video about scary sharks
• This study suggests that high sensation seekers prefer more exciting media while
low sensation seekers actually find less exciting media to be more enjoyable.
o Relaxation
§ A carefully selected non-arousing TV program or video can often be the perfect remedy
to ease the household tension at this time of day.
§ But those who have high arousal set points that need to be lowered may be particularly
likely to choose this kind of entertainment repeatedly.
o Escape
§ As an escape from the unpleasant duties and occupations that you have in real life.
§ Just as a drug addict seeks escape from reality through drug use, so the TV addict may be
seeking an escape from the stresses and strains of life through watching TV programs.
o Passing Time
§ It is not uncommon today to find TC screens in a variety of public places where people
have to wait for things to happen.
§ Major airlines caught on to this principle years ago when they started to offer movies in
longer flights
o Social interaction
§ To be prepared for various sorts of interactions with other people afterwards
§ I know that if I miss the episode, I´ll feel left out of some of the office conversation the next
day.

Beyond mere descriptions of media use

• Some of the most recent research along these lines attempts to connect people´s motivations for using
particular media with the effects that the media might have on them.
• The respondents in the study who sent the most tweets were also those who reported the greatest sense
of satisfaction when it came to feelings of connection with others.
• For example, if you know someone who loves to watch Oprah, does this fact tell you anything about how
that person is when compared to another person who loves to watch Jerry Springer?
o Compared to the Oprah viewers, those who liked to watch Jerry Springer reported that TV shows
were less realistic and said that they enjoyed watching shows where people got angry,
embarrassed, and hurt by someone else.
o Oprah viewers tended to be much more likely to be motivated to form a parasocial relationship
with the host than were the viewers of Jerry Springer
o Viewers with high levels of aggression were much more likely to enjoy watching guests being
embarrassed or hurt.
• The researchers did not attempt to study the effects that talk shows had on these viewers brought with
them to the viewing experience. Viewers who think that these shows are quite realistic might tend to be
influenced to adopt attitudes and behaviors that they see depicted on the screen.
 • Adolescents tune in to watch certain kinds of programs to see characters that might inspire them toward
achieving certain personal goals. Marika Tiggemann concluded that the effects of media exposure on
body image needed to be examined in the context of various viewing motivations.

The problem with self-reports

• You might be able to report quite accurately that the reason you watched the news last night was to find
out how the weather would be for the football game today. But if you were called on to report your
motivations for watching the news six weeks ago, you might have to resort to a reasonable speculation
about your behavior.
• People might deliberately misrepresent their viewing motives. One of the principal reasons that people
might do this is to make a good impression on the researchers.
o Social desirability response: that is they may want to make themselves look good for the
researchers.
§ Researchers need to stay sensitive to the potential problems of self-report data

Time spent with media

• On average, children and adolescents in this age range watch nearly 4.5 hours of TV each day. On
average, children spend over 7.5 hours each day with media of some sort.
• While the average amount of daily time spent with media was about 7.5 hours, children were exposed to
more than 10.5 hours of media content during that 7.5 hour period. How is this possible?
o Too often, I have seen them surfing the internet at the same time they are monitoring their favorite
TV show.
• During an average year, the average child spends the equivalent of over 2 months of 24-hour days doing
nothing but watching TV
• Report about children between 6 months and 6 years of age:
o 84% of all children in this age range live in a home with or more TV sets
o The authors concluded that “the vast majority of children are growing up in homes where
television is a near-constant presence
• More than 40% of children between 2 and 3 years old watch a video or DVD during a typical day. And,
during a typical day, about 12% of children in this same age group use a computer.
• With all of this viewing time, it seems naïve to suggest that TV and movies are merely innocuous sources
of entertainment that have little or no impact on viewers.

The displacement hypothesis

• Researchers have been concerned about the possibility that the large quantity of time spent with media
(primarily television) was serving to displace time that would be spent in other important activities.
o Displacement hypothesis
• If, as the data seems to show, the time spent watching TV and movies has increased over the years, then
it would seem logical to suspect that the time spent in some other activities must necessarily have
decreased.
• One study (survey panel design) examined data on nearly 2000 children over an eight-year period.
o The authors reported that more than 60% of children’s viewing time came form activities that
could be regarded as marginal in terms of their overall importance.

Displacement of important activities

• Sometimes, however, activities that seem trivial may not be so trivial when examined more closely. If a TV
viewing has a tendency to decrease opportunities for social interaction, perhaps people will lose the
many benefits that come form close social ties.
• David Myers discusses the decline in marriage, the reduction of social networks, the increase in
individualism, a decline in civility, and so forth.
• Child psychologists argue that developing children need to engage in a proper amount of fantasy play
to maintain an optimum level of simulation that encourages healthy growth.
o Two researchers concluded that the best evidence suggests that TV viewing discourages fantasy
play through a displacement effect.
 o Programs with high levels of violence reduce fantasy play, while nonviolent program appear to
have little impact either way.
• One of the chief concerns among educators is that watching TV disrupts academic learning by displacing
important educational activities such as reading.
o As children spent more time watching TV, they tended to spend less time on activities related to
education, talking to others, or playing video games.

Threshold effect
• Although Potter did uncover a negative relationship between TV viewing and academic achievement,
the relationship did not appear to kick in until TV viewing had reached at least ten hours per week.
• In this case, no negative impact from TV viewing was observed until the ten-hours-per-week threshold
had been crossed.
• They concluded that there was a small negative correlation between TV viewing and reading skill, but
they argued that this relationship was probably not evidence of a direct impact of TV viewing.
o Instead, in the opinion of these authors, Children who are more fluent readers tend to be more
intelligent, to read more, and to watch television less.
• One particularly interesting question about displacement effect has to do with the impact of computers
and the Internet.
o Waipeng Lee and Eddie Kuo discovered that increased use of the Internet did tend to be
associated with reductions in the amounts of time that children spent watching TV. It also tended
to be associated with increases in the amount of time spent reading newspapers listening to the
radio, and talking with friends

Television viewing and obesity

• The notion that television viewing might lead to obesity seems like a pretty reasonable conjecture. TV
viewing may also encourage extra eating, which could lead to additional pounds.
• More than 20 years ago, a sample of 1,000 respondents:
o The results of the study revealed that TV viewing was indeed positively correlated with snaking
behavior
o 52% of the people who watched more than 28 hours of TV each week were overweight.
• In a large-scale survey of nearly 5,000 women over the age of 19, those who watched three to four hours
of TV per day were compared to those who watched less than one hour per day.
o Those who watched three to four hours each day had twice the rate of obesity.
• We have to settle for the knowledge that TV viewing and obesity are related, and that there is good
reason to suspect that the relationship is partly due to the fact that TV viewing displaced physical activity.
• The intervention was successful and caused the authors to conclude that a powerful weapon in reducing
BMI (Body mass index) in children is to reduce their media use.
o A final piece of suggestive evidence emerged from a recent study that showed that television
viewing was strongly associated with childrenhood hypertension.
• A team of scholars uncovered another possible mechanism in a large-scale study of Chinese youth.
o The researchers concluded that TV viewing may exert its causal force on increased obesity simply
by attracting the attention of some viewers to commercials for snacks