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Criticisms of Uses and Gratifications Research

15 January, 2016 - 09:14

Although uses and gratifications approach holds a significant status in communication research, the research of the approach receives criticisms both on its theory and methodology represented.

McQuail (1994) commented that the approach has not provided much successful prediction or casual explanation of media choice and use. Since it is indeed that much media use is circumstantial and weakly motivated, the approach seems to work best in examining specific types of media where motivation might be presented (McQuail, 1994).

The researcher Ien Ang also criticized uses and gratifications approach in such three aspects:

  1. It is highly individualistic, taking into account only the individual psychological gratification derived from individual media use. The social context of the media use tends to be ignored. This overlooks the fact that some media use may have nothing to do with the pursuit of gratification - it may be forced upon us for example.
  2. There is relatively little attention paid to media content, researchers attending to why people use the media, but less to what meanings they actually get out of their media use.
  3. The approach starts from the view that the media are always functional to people and may thus implicitly offer a justification for the way the media are currently organized (cited by CCMS-Infobase, 2003).

Since it is hard to keep track of exposure patterns through observation, uses and gratifications research focus on the fact relied heavily on self-reports (Katz, 1987). Self-reports, however, are based on personal memory which can be problematic (Nagel et al., 2004). As such, the respondents might inaccurately recall how they behave in media use and thus distortion might occur in the study.