Uses and Gratifications Approach

This topic presents some difficulties, in that there is no clear or agreed definition to be offered. In general terms, the uses and gratifications approach refers to a media research orientation, in which priority is given to the perspective of the receiving audience, with [Page 801]particular reference to self-perceived motives or reasons for using (attending to) mass media and the satisfactions (or gratifications) they believe that media (both the process of use and the particular content) provide. Information of this kind is believed to shed light on the dynamics of audience formation, explaining variations in attention and appreciation. It is also a potential predictor of certain kinds and degree of effect, on the assumption that the consequences of media use or content received will depend, to some degree, on the motivations of the audience. Audience motivations are, in turn, expected to vary according to social circumstances and individual differences.

The approach has a significant place in the history of political communication research as well as in the field of communication generally. The origins lie in an early stage in the form of studies that were carried out during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. These studies were characterized by a strong focus on the subjective experience of the audience, on recounting and making sense of “media use” from this perspective. The underlying issue was expressed by Elihu Katz as a need to focus less on what the media do to people and more on what people do with their media. Early studies were mainly concerned with children's general media use and with certain entertainment genres (especially with radio soap operas aimed at women audiences), although the significance of newspaper reading was also assessed.

Compared to the predominant focus on persuasion, propaganda, and mass information at the time, this was little more than a byway of the communication research field. It became more central during the 1960s, for a number of reasons, but primarily because of dissatisfaction with the apparent sterility of mainstream research into persuasive effects. The basic model for effect research derived from a view of mass communication as one-directional and noninteractive, governed by the motives of the source and sender and with a high potential to directly impart information and opinions, following a stimulus-response logic, even against the apparent interests of the receiver. The adoption of this “propaganda” model had typically failed to produce much evidence of significant effects from the media (still presumed to be powerful) or to explain patterns of media use behavior. The indisputable public appeal of all forms of mass media, with such little evidence of effect, was increasingly seen as a conundrum requiring systematic inquiry and especially attention to the driving forces underlying media use.

Another support for the adoption of this approach was the then contemporary appeal of “functionalism,” a theoretical school that sought to explain recurrent social phenomena (such as media use) in terms of their consequences for the society, mediated by individual perceptions and motivations. Charles Wright, following Harold Lasswell and Robert Merton, named the main societal functions of media as “surveillance,” “correlation,” “cultural transmission,” and “entertainment.” The emerging “uses and gratifications” approach seemed to offer a way both of explaining the appeal of mass media (answering the question “why use media?”) and also of providing a key to potential effects.

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