Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century

Uses and Gratifications Theory
in the 21st Century
Thomas E. Ruggiero
Communications Department
University of Texas at El Paso
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.
What mass communication scholars today refer to as the uses and gratifications
(U&G) approach is generally recognized to be a subtradition of media effects research (McQuail, 1994). Early in the history of communications research, an approach was developed to study the gratifications that attract and hold audiences to
the kinds of media and the types of content that satisfy their social and psychological needs (Cantril, 1942). Much early effects research adopted the experimental or
quasi-experimental approach, in which communication conditions were manipulated in search of general lessons about how better to communicate, or about the unintended consequences of messages (Klapper, 1960).

Other media effects research sought to discover motives and selection patterns
of audiences for the new mass media. Examples include Cantril and Allport (1935)
on the radio audience; Waples, Berelson, and Bradshaw (1940) on reading; Herzog
(1940, 1944) on quiz programs and the gratifications from radio daytime serials;
Suchman (1942) on the motives for listening to serious music; Wolfe and Fiske
(1949) on children’s interest in comics; Berelson (1949) on the functions of newspaper reading; and Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1942, 1944, 1949) on different media
genres. Each of these studies formulated a list of functions served either by some
specific content or by the medium itself:
To match one’s wits against others, to get information and advice for daily living, to
provide a framework for one’s day, to prepare oneself culturally for the demands of
upward mobility, or to be reassured about the dignity and usefulness of one’s role.
(Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1974, p. 20)
This latter focus of research, conducted in a social-psychological mode, and audience based, crystallized into the U&G approach (McQuail, 1994).
Some mass communication scholars cited “moral panic” and the Payne Fund
Studies as the progenitor of U&G theory. Undertaken by the U.S. Motion Picture
Research Council, the Payne Fund Studies were carried out in the late 1920s.
Leading sociologists and psychologists including Herbert Blumer, Philip Hauser,
and L. L. Thurstone sought to understand how movie viewing was affecting the
youth of America (Lowery & DeFleur, 1983). Rosengren, Johnsson-Smaragdi, and
Sonesson (1994), however, argued that the Payne Fund Studies were primarily effects-oriented propaganda studies, as opposed to the U&G tradition, which focuses
on research of individual use of the media. Likewise, Cantril’s (1940) study of
Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast was more narrowly interested
in sociological and psychological factors associated with panic behavior than in developing a theory about the effects of mass communication (Lowery & DeFleur,
1983).
Wimmer and Dominick (1994) proposed that U&G began in the 1940s when researchers became interested in why audiences engaged in various forms of media
behavior, such as listening to the radio or reading the newspaper. Still others credit
the U&G perspective with Schramm’s (1949) immediate reward and delayed reward model of media gratifications (Dozier & Rice, 1984).
Regardless, early U&G studies were primarily descriptive, seeking to classify
the responses of audience members into meaningful categories (Berelson,
Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, &
Gaudet, 1948; Merton, 1949).
Most scholars agree that early research had little theoretical coherence and was
primarily behaviorist and individualist in its methodological tendencies (McQuail,
1994). The researchers shared a qualitative approach by attempting to group gratifi-cation statements into labeled categories, largely ignoring their frequency distribution in the population. The earliest researchers for the most part did not attempt to
explore the links between the gratifications detected and the psychological or sociological origins of the needs satisfied. They often failed to search for the interrelations among the various media functions, either quantitatively or conceptually, in a
manner that might have led to the detection of the latent structure of media gratifications.
Criticisms of early U&G research focus on the fact that it (a) relied heavily on
self-reports, (b) was unsophisticated about the social origin of the needs that audiences bring to the media, (c) was too uncritical of the possible dysfunction both for
self and society of certain kinds of audience satisfaction, and (d) was too captivated
by the inventive diversity of audiences used to pay attention to the constraints of the
text (Katz, 1987). Despite severe limitations, early researchers, especially those at
the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, persevered, particularly in examining the effects of the mass media on political behavior. They studied voters in Erie County, Ohio, during the 1940 election between Roosevelt and
Wilkie (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948) and voters in Elmira, New York, during the 1948
Truman–Dewey election (Berelson et al., 1954). Both studies suggested that the
mass media played a weak role in election decisions compared with personal influence and influence of other people. As a result, Berelson et al. began amplifying the
two-step flow theory, moving away from the concept of an “atomized” audience
and toward the impact of personal influence (Katz, 1960).