It is well accepted that communication theories have developed through the realms of psychology and sociology over the past 100 years. With illumed by valuable ideas as well as exploring more untilled fields in these two disciplines, researchers elicit a series of higher conceptions of understanding media. As a sub-tradition of media effects research, uses and gratifications approach is suggested to be originally stemmed from a functionalist paradigm in the social sciences (Blumler & Katz, 1974).
To some extent, however, functional theory on communication agrees with media’s effects towards people. For example, a model often used in the theory, the Hypodermic Syringe model, discusses
that the mass media have a direct, immediate and influential effect upon audiences by ‘injecting’ information into the consciousness of the masses
(Watson & Hill 1997, p.
105). Functional theory influenced studies on communication from the 1920s to the 1940s. After that, a shift which rediscovered the relationship between media and people occurred and led to
establishment of uses and gratifications approach.
The exploration of gratifications that motivate people to be attracted to certain media is almost as old as empirical mass communication research itself (McQuail, 1983). Dating back to the 1940s, researchers became interested in the reasons for viewing different radio programmes, such as soap operas and quizzes, as well as daily newspaper (Lazrsfeld & Stanton, 1944, 1949; Herzog, 1944; Warner & Henry, 1948; etc.). In these studies, researchers discovered a list of functions served either by some specific content or by the medium itself (Katz et al., 1974b). For instance, radio soap operas were found to satisfy their listeners with advice, support, or occasions for emotional release (Herzog, 1944; Warner and Henry, 1948); rather than just offering information, newspaper was also discovered to be important to give readers a sense of security, shared topics of conversation and a structure to the daily routine (Berelson, 1949). For these diverse dimensions of usage satisfaction, psychologist Herzog (1944) marked them with the term “gratifications.”
Uses and gratifications approach became prevailing in the late 1950s till 1970s when television has grown up. Some basic assumptions of the approach were proposed when it was rediscovered during that era. Among the group of scholars who focus on uses and gratifications research, Elihu Katz is one of the most well-known and contributed greatly to establishing the structure of the approach.
Elihu Katz is served both as a sociologist and as a communication researcher. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1956 from Columbia University and began teaching at the University of Chicago until 1963. During the next thirty years, he taught in the Department of Sociology and Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the late 1960, invited by the Government of Israel, Katz headed the task force charged with the introduction of television broadcasting. This experience led to his subsequent academic work about broadcasting and television in leisure, culture and communication from the 1970s to1990s (UPENN, 2001). In 1992, he joined the faculty of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, and also directed its experimentaln that people use the media to their benefit. In a study by Katz, Gurevitch and Haas (1973), a subject which is known as the usThey took a more humanistic approach to looking at media use. They suggest that media users seek out a medium source that best fulfills the needs of the user and they have alternate choices to satisfy their need. (Blumler & Katz, 1974). They also discovered that media served the functions of surveillance, correlation, entertainment and cultural transmission for both society and individuals (Blumler and Katz, 1974).
Five basic assumptions were stated in a study of Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch in 1974 as follows. They provide a framework for understanding the correlation between media and audiences:
- The audience is conceived as active, i.e., an important part of of mass media use is assumed to be goal oriented … patterns of media use are shaped by more or less definite expectations of what certain kinds of content have to offer the audience member.
- In the mass communication process much initiative in linking need gratification and media choice lies with the audience member. This places a strong limitation on theorizing about any form of straight-line effect of media content on attitudes and behavior.
- The media compete with other sources of need satisfaction. The needs served by mass communication constitute but a segment of the wider range of human needs, and the degree to which they can be adequately met through mass media consumption certainly varies.
- Methodologically speaking, many of the goals of mass media use can be derived from data supplied by individual audience members themselves- i.e., people are sufficiently self-aware to be able to report their interests and motives in particular cases, or at least to recognize them when confronted with them in an intelligible and familiar verbal formulation.
- Value judgments about the cultural significance of mass communication should be suspended while audience orientations are explored on their own terms. (p. 15-17).
In addition, Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch also commented that, although previous researches on gratifications detected diverse gratifications that attract people on the media, they did not
address the connections between these gratifications (Katz et al., 1974a). They suggested that uses and gratifications research concern with following aspects: (1) the social and
the psychological origins of (2) needs which generate (3) expectations of (4) the mass media or other sources which lead to (5) differential exposure (or engaging in other activities),
resulting in (6) need gratification and (7) other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones
(Katz et al., 1974b, p. 20).
The studies of Katz and his colleagues laid a theoretical foundation of building the uses and gratifications approach. Since then, the research on this subject has been strengthened and extended. The current status of uses and gratifications is still based on Katz’s first analysis, particularly as new media forms have emerged in such an electronic information age when people have more options of media use.
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