Although the uses and gratifications approach lacks a single general theory,

it is not inherently atheoretical, and the author suggests how progress can
be made in dealing with four conceptual issues facing this tradition: the
nature of the "active" audience; the role of gratification orientations in
mediating effects; the social origins of media needs and uses; and the
interest shared with students of popular culture in perceptions of and
cognitions about mass media content formed by audience members.

THE ROLE OF THEORY IN

USES AND GRATIFICATIONS
STUDIES
JAY G. BLUMLER

This paper will not discuss a series of recent &dquo;advances&dquo;

in uses and gratifications theory. It aims instead to review
the agenda of theoretical issues currently facing this tradi-
tion of mass communication research (a) in light of the
major stock-taking that appeared three years ago (Blumler
and Katz, 1974) and (b) in response to subsequent work and
writings. Undeniably, a number of theoretical problems
associated with this approach remain unsolved. Yet some
critics’ views about how they should be overcome seem
misconceived.

A GRAND THEORY?
’

It has become fashionable to criticise practitioners of

uses and gratifications research for a formidable array of
ultimate theoretical shortcomings-for weaknesses, that is,
that are supposedly lodged in the very underpinnings of
their outlook. Sometimes virtually in the same breath (or
rather in the same passage of type), they are taxed for being
(a) crassly atheoretical (Elliott, 1974), (b) perversely eclectic
(Swanson, 1976), (c) ensnared in the logical pitfalls of

9
10

functionalism (Carey and Kreiling, 1974), and (d) for flirting

with positions at odds with their functionalist origins
(Swanson, 1976). No wonder Swanson (1976) has conclud-
ed that, &dquo;The nature of the theory underlying uses and
gratifications research is not totally clear&dquo; (the stress on the
definite article is mine). Although uses and gratifications
authors are at least partly responsible for this wealth of
confusion, much of this line of criticism does seem to stem
from a false expectation. To identify the fallacy, however,,
it is necessary to tread once again over familiar historical
ground.
The and gratifications approach came most promi-
uses
nently fore in the late 1950s and early 1960s at a
to the
time of widespread .disappointment with the fruits of at-
tempts to measure the short-term effects on people of their
exposure to mass media campaigns. It reflected a desire to
understand audience involvement in mass communications
in terms more faithful to the individual user’s own exper-
ience and perspective than the effects tradition could attain.
It sought to replace the image of the audience member as a
passive victim, thought to be implicit in effects studies, with
one of a person who could actively bend programmes,
articles, films, and songs to his own purposes. It rested on
the assumption that interesting and important differences
of orientation to mass media fare obtained between differ-
ent audience members. It was further supposed that varia-
tions in such orientations would covary with numerous
other communication-relevant factors, such as (a) people’s
social circumstances and roles, (b) their personality disposi-
tions and capacities, (c) their actual patterns of mass media
consumption, and (d) ultimately, the process of effects itself.
Crucial to the argument is the equivalence of uses and
gratifications research with effects research. The former is
like, yet opposed to, the latter. Nobody would have dreamed
of insisting that effects researchers should form a single
school united around the same theoretical commitments.
They were not castigated as eclectics because some aligned
 11

themselves, say, with Bandura, while others supported

Berkowitz, and still others followed in the wake of Tannen-
baum. Of course such scholars shared certain investigative
points of departure, certain convictions about the phenome-
na that most merited research priority, and certain method-
ologies of attack. Yet it was not deemed a weakness that,
under such a capacious umbrella, many different theories
sheltered and engaged in mutual disputation. It was fair
enough to expect each individual student of communica-
tion effects to explicate his own theoretical assumptions
and hypotheses as clearly and coherently as possible. But a
demand that each investigator of media effects should try to
bring his theoretical framework into line with that of his
colleagues would have seemed decidedly odd.
It is wrong to treat uses and gratifications scholarship any
differently. Peruse Blumler and Katz (1974) in this spirit,
and you will find that uses and gratifications theories abound
in its pages. Wright defends a functionalist version. McQuail
and Gurevitch outline two other theoretical approaches that
could guide data-gathering about audience gratifications.
McGuire, writing as a remarkably fertile card-carrying
psychologist, seems able to conceive of 16 such theories?
Rosengren puts forward a theoretical stance of his own-in
which people’s media requirements derive from deficiencies
in their environmental and personality capacities to realise
certain universal human needs (cf. especially Rosengren and
Windahl, 1972). of Course, when each author enters the
theoretical arena, he becomes a fair target for critiques of his
logic, clarity, plausibility, and sensitivity to what really
matters under the mass communication sun. The one com-
out of court is comment on their
plaint that should be ruled
collective failure to evolve a fully corporate doctrine.
In short, there is no such thing as a 94 the) uses and
gratifications theory, although there are plenty of theories
about uses and gratifications phenomena, which may well
differ with each other over many issues. Together, they will
share a common field of concern, an elementary set of con-
 12

cepts indispensable for intelligibly carving up that terrain,

and an identification of certain wider features of the mass
communication process with which such core phenomena
are presumed to be connected.’ Rival theories may generate
conflicting predictions about how those phenomena are
empirically associated, but we should not be dismayed by or
critical of their profusion and variety.
It is true that as functionalism lost its charm, uses and
gratifications researchers could no longer situate their work
within a comprehensive weltanschauung, fusing a model of
man, a set of ultimate values, and a vision of how social
structures, control systems, and cultural practices all bear
down on the mass communication field. They certainly have
no ideology/sociology/political philosophy/ethic all rolled
into one-to offer. Perhaps that explains why some academ-
ics, themselves armed with some such all-embracing creed,
find them hopelessly atheoretical. But is the lack of this
form of grand theory all that deplorable? After all, it is the
distinctive mission of uses and gratifications research to get
tao grips with the nature of audience experience itself, which
is ever in danger of being ignored or misread by (a) elitists
who cannot partake of it and (b) grand theoreticians who
believe they understand the significance of such experience
better than do the poor benighted receivers themselves.
Thus, uses and gratifications data supply the cautionary
elements of our field, including antidotes against some of
the more outlandish outcomes of extravagant theorising.
The uses and gratifications position also reminds us that
theoretical propositions in our field need to be tested for
their plausibility against the realities of audience exper-
ience, which constitute an inescapable funnel through
which all mass communication content must flow before it
can effect whatever impact it is destined to exert.
None of the foregoing should be read as an excuse for
avoiding theoretical issues or as a claim that fruitful theoris-
ing typically follows rather than precedes data collection.
This author fully accepts one of Swanson’s (1976) funda-
 13

mental prescriptions-that &dquo;the importance of conceptual

analysis must be recognised,&dquo; and again that &dquo;conceptual
analysis should be a priority for us all.&dquo; The remaining four
sections of this paper reflect a personal selection of con-
ceptual problems that currently seem most urgent.

AN ACTIVE AUDIENCE?

In one respect, uses and gratifications writings have not

been totally &dquo;ideology-free.&dquo; In fact, their stress on the
activity of the mass media audience stemmed from liberal-
rationalist beliefs in human dignity and the potential of the
individual for self-realisation. The issue to be considered
here is whether what has hitherto been treated as an article
of faith should now be converted into an empirical question.
This has not been seriously attempted so far for three
main reasons. First, the notion of &dquo;the active audience&dquo;
has conflated an extraordinary range of meanings, includ-
ing those of utility (mass communication has uses for
people), intentionality (media consumption is directed by
prior motivation), selectivity (media behavior reflects prior
interests and preferences), and imperviousness to influence
(Bauer’s, 1964, &dquo;obstinate audience&dquo;). Thus, little attention
has been paid to the tasks of sorting out these distinct
meanings, pondering their separate implications for other
media phenomena, and finding ways of operationalising
them as empirical tools. Second, the active audience has
been treated as an either/or matter; either, in the company
of uses and gratifications scholars, you regarded the audi-
ence as active, or, with other scholars, you relegated it to
a more passive or reactive role. Consequently, the possi-

bility of treating &dquo;audience activeness&dquo; as a variable was

overlooked. Third, it was not appreciated that some media
might invite more, or less, audience activity than others.
Thus, its undifferentiated emphasis on the active audience
left the uses and gratifications tradition vulnerable to statis-
tical demonstrations-such as that recently offered by
14

Goodhardt et al. (1975)-that, when the television audience

is examined behaviourally over time, few signs of a struc-
turing of viewing by content preferences emerge.
If ideology is to be transcended in this sphere, then, a
first step must be to distinguish and dimensionalise some of
the different senses in which audience members could be
active. One approach to this task might differentiate forms
of &dquo;active-ness&dquo; likely to manifest themselves at different
moments in a temporally ordered mass communication
sequence: before exposure; during consumption; and after
the media experience as such has been terminated. For
example, a person might be regarded as more active in
advance of exposure if he consults information about what
is available; or plans when and what media fare will be .

consumed; or has a clear prior expectation of what he can

get out of patronising some medium; or can specify the
criteria of what counts as superior specimens of materials
that interest him. During consumption, activity might be
indexed by degree of attention paid to the output consumer
or by, ability to recall what it included. Subsequent activity
would presumably depend on such after-exposure &dquo;uses&dquo;
as a readiness to reflect on media materials, to talk about
them with others, or to absorb them into other activities
(e.g., in voting choices, purchasing behaviour, children’s
play, taking over styles of dress, singing, and so on).
Such an attempt to separate out the different possible
meanings of audience activity would open up a number of
interesting paths of empirical research exploration. How, for
example, do the several indices of audience activity relate to
each other? Are people more or less active across-the-
board, as it were, or differentially so along the different
dimensions of such activity? How do the several indices
look when compared across different population sub-
groups ? Which sectors of the audience are more active in
which respects? How do they look when compared across
different media and media genres? Are some forms of .

media consumption more actively involving than others?

 15

How does the unselective television audience depicted by

Goodhardt et al. (1975) look when approached from these
several angles? Finally, what are the implications of audi-
ence activity of various kinds for effects processes? This last
question recalls an occasionally reported, yet still some-
what neglected, finding in television research-how the
audience for a given programme form is divisible between a
casually captive and a more committed element. By dimen-
sionalising audience activity in the manner proposed, it
might be possible to draw other significant distinctions
within the mass audience, helping thereby to refine the
detection of effects. In other words, there may well be many
unnoticed analogues in people’s uses of other forms of
media content to the Blumler and McQuail (1968) discovery
of profoundly differing reactions to election broadcasts on
the part of those individuals who saw them because of their
heavy customary viewing habits and those who followed
them chiefly out of a keen political interest.

HOW DO GRATIFICATIONS MEDIATE EFFECTS?

The hope that the study of audience need would re-

vitalise the measurement of media effects has too often
been voiced in a sort of theoretical vacuum. It is true that
empirical research has yielded a scatter of indications that
gratification orientations are indeed relevant to the effects
process-sometimes by supplementing exposure influ-
ences (McLeod and Becker, 1974), sometimes by inter-
acting with them (Blumler and McQuail, 1968; Kline et al.,
1974). Yet one looks in vain for the theoretical advances
that such findings should presumably have stimulated.
This lack has several sources. One is sheer neglect. A full
list of published gratifications-by-effects studies would be
exceedingly spare. Second, work on the involvement of
gratifications in media effects has been far too reliant on
retrospective speculation. It is not very far from the mark
to characterise the prevailing strategy as one of feeding a
16

number of audience orientations into the computer at the

gratifications end and seeing what emerges at the effects
end. Third, such audience orientations have often been
represented by single-item measures rather than by scores
compiled from endorsements of a number of items in a fairly
homogeneous and reliable gratification factor. Fourth, the
relationship between the focus of such gratification vari-
ables and the form of content assumed to exert some effect
has sometimes been rather loose. Finally, little account
has been taken of the multifunctionality of media content,
which would presumably require a testing of hypotheses for
effects based on combinations of gratifications sought.
At bottom we lack a well-formed prior perspective about
which gratifications sought from which forms of content are
likely to facilitate which effects. But before considering
some elements that might belong to such a perspective, a
confusion within the original uses and gratifications phil-
osophy should be mentioned. Some pioneers of this ap-
proach perceived audience intentionality of any kind as
serving to block message effects. Such is the line of thought
which links the notion of an active audience to an obstinate
one. And in at least one agenda-setting study, some evi-
dence in support of this model has appeared (McLeod,
Becker, and Byrnes, 1974). Yet this stance differs from the
position of those uses and gratifications researchers who
were sceptical about the limited effects model of media

impact and who expected gratification variables to provide

fine-tuned discriminators of diverse lines of media influ-
ence. The original design of the Blumler and McQuail

(1968) study of the British General Election of 1964 illus-

trates this point of view:

we expected a division of the members of a sample, accord-

to their different motives for following election broad-
ing
casts, either to disclose previously undetected relationships
between attitude change and campaign exposure, or to
strengthen faint ones appreciably.
 17

Yet Blumler and McQuail also neglected to specify in ad-

vance how particular motives might induce particular forms
of attitude change.
This theoretical nettle can be grasped only by becoming
specific and considering how certain impulses of audience
motivation, which clearly underlie much mass media use,
might plausibly be expected to facilitate certain influence
processes. The numerous typologies of audience need that
have emerged from recent work do provide empirical guide-
lines to the designation of such motives (Blumler, 1976;
&dquo;

Dyckoff, forthcoming; Katz, Gurevitch, and Haas, 1973:

Kippax and Murray, 1976). Despite many other differences,
three orientations have surfaced from these studies with
such regularity and distinctness that they clearly deserve
focal attention from the standpoint of their likely effects
repercussions. They include, first of all, a cognitive orienta-
tion, whereby the audience member looks primarily for
information about some feature of society and the wider
world around him-as in &dquo;surveillance&dquo; sought from the
news, information about party policies and other issues of
the day from election broadcasts, or perhaps &dquo;reality ex-
ploration&dquo; as a use of many fictional series and serials
scheduled on television and radio. Second, people want
diversion of many kinds, including, for example, the relief
from boredom and constraints of daily routines derived from
chat shows, music, comedy, and other forms of light enter-
tainment, as well as the excitement generated by adventure
serials, quizzes, sports and competitive games, and even
the horse-race appeal of following an election campaign.
Third, uses and gratifications studies have often highlighted
a separate personal identity function, standing for ways
of using media materials to give added salience to some-
thing important in the audience member’s own life or
situation. In a recent Leeds study, for example (Blumler,
1976), this orientation was represented by respondents’
endorsements of the following statements:

It sometimes reminds me of past events in my life.

 18

It shows what others are thinking about people like me.

It gives me support for my ideas.

I sometimes find examples of how to get on with others.
It makes me wish I were like. some of the people I see or read
.

about.
I canimagine myself in situations I see or read about.
It makes me feel as if I really know the people I see or read
about.

.
How might propositions about media effects be generated
from this tripartite gratifications scheme? First, we may
postulate that cognitive motivation will facilitate informa-
tion gain. This hypothesis is not quite so obvious or trivial as
its formulation initially suggests. Consider, for example, the
viewing of TV news bulletins. In substance and presenta-
tion, they are not necessarily designed to reward only cogni-
tive drivels. The personalities of news-readers, the light-
hearted sprinklings of humour and banter, and the high-
lighting of conflict and drama in many news areas may all
cater powerfully to other than cognitive impluses. More-
over, gratification studies of news consumption have typi-
cally yielded diversionary/affective orientations that seem
to match these content characteristics (Blumler, Brown,
and McQuail, 1970; Levy, 1977). Thus, the proposed hy-
pothesis postulates that in such a complex of multifunc-
tional possibilities, the person who is more strongly and
more exclusively moved to consume media materials for
their informational content is more likely to acquire know-
ledge from them. And since such an orientation may well
vary strongly and systematically across population sub-
groups (i.e., be more common among males, the middle-
aged, the well-educated, and members of the professional
and executive middle-class), exploration of this seemingly
straightforward hypothesis might even help to shed light
on the forces sustaining the so-called knowledge gap
between different sectors of society.2
 19

Second, media consumption for purposes of diversion

and escape will favour audience acceptance of perceptions
of social situations in line with portrayals frequently found
in entertainment materials. This hypothesis stems from that
school of thought which regards lack of involvement (Krug-
man, 1965) and distraction (Festinger and Maccoby, 1964)
as facilitators of media impact under conditions in which

people are exposed to content explicitly or implicitly pro-

jectirig some consistent message. Central to this approach
is the idea that when a person’s perceptual guard has been
lowered, he will be more open to influence by the frames of
reference embedded in the materials he has been attend-
ing. And with repeated exposure to the same or similar
materials, a drop-by-drop &dquo;over-learning&dquo; of its perspec-
tive (as Krugman has put it) may occur. What the uses and
gratifications approach could offer this low involvement
model of media effects is a missing motivational link. Media
attendance for the purpose of diversion is likely to be literal-
ly diverting in another sense. By inhibiting conscious reflec-
tion on the frames of reference inherent in the materials he
is enjoying, the individual may be encouraged to absorb them
uncritically into the fabric of his own outlook. Thus, this
particular gratifications-effects hypothesis might help
.

researchers to study the processes whereby highly acces-

sible and immediately appealing entertainment forms
convey stereotypical impressions of real-life characters,
roles, and conflict situations, which are widely absorbed
in turn by audience members simply wanting to be relaxed,
entertained, and thrilled.
Third, involvement in media materials for personal iden-
tity reasons is likely to promote reinforcement effects. I n
principle, of course, a preoccupation with the self during
exposure could equally well stem from pressures on the
individual to change his ways rather than entrench them.
He might be hoping to resolve some personal dilemma or to
find a rationale to justify some change in his outlook, way
of life, or social and political allegiances. Individuals placed
20

in situations demanding change and adaptation, however,

are more likely to seek advice and support from personal
acquaintances than from media materials, which can only
rarely refer directly to the specific ingredients of people’s
problematic predicaments and choices. As McGuire (1974)
has suggested in a series of acute observations on the
psychological roots of media motivation, when people throw
their identities into mass communication offerings, more
often than not they will probably seek (and therefore pre-
sumably find) a reinforcement of what they personally
appreciate, stand for, and value:
Insofar as mass communication presents a culturally stereo-
typed and sanitized oversimplification of an untidy and un-
satisfying reality, it offers the recipients an oportunity for
the gratification of bolstering their implicit theories of the
world.
fictional material [in the media] ...
provides constant re-
affirmation of the wisdom and ultimate vindication of one’s
choice of and persistence in a respectable life-style by
showing that those who cling to it tend to be rewarded, while
those who adopt unconventional life-styles that flaunt the
rules of propriety or conventional morality tend to come to an
evil end.
The average person is presented with a range of materials by
the newspaper, the television set, etc. that is far wider
than one could possibly obtain in ones ordinary life which is
typically spent with persons much like oneself. From this
material one can extract information to construct one’s self-
concept, one’s view of the world and of human nature and
social relations as needed; and when one has already formu-
lated such concepts, then mass communications allow one
to bolster this image of oneself and one’s world.
the mass media, obviously in their fictional presentations
and to an appreciable extent even in their factual ones,
present people playing recognised and stylized roles.....
Even where the persons depicted are presented in pedes-
trian roles...the presentation is such as to emphasize and
enhance the significance of these roles which in fact are
shared by most members of the audience.
 21

HOW DO MEDIA NEEDS

ORIGINATE IN SOCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES?

Uses and gratifications authors have always been strong-

ly opposed to &dquo;mass audience&dquo; terminology as a way of
labelling the collectivities that watch TV shows, attend
movies, and read magazines and newspapers in their
millions. A diverse range of motives would impel different
members of the audience to tune in to the same events.
People’s media requirements would also vary systematic-
ally according to their differing social roles and situations.
Nevertheless, when surveying the state of this art a few
years ago, Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1974) confessed
that,. &dquo;The social and environmental circumstances that
lead people to turn to the mass media for the satisfaction of
certain needs are ... little understood as yet.&dquo; Even though
they managed to extract, from previous writings, references
to five different routes along which &dquo;social factors may be
involved in the generation of media-related needs,&dquo; them
still conceded how difficult it was &dquo;to conceive of a general
theory that might clarify the various processes that underlie
any such specific relationships.&dquo; More recently, Levy (1977)
has noticed the same gap: &dquo;there is no general theoretical
framework which systematically links gratifications to their
social and psychological origins.&dquo; _

Attempts to supply one have been held back by several

factors. For one thing, the exercise required is dauntingly
vast. How could the derivation of media needs from, say,
restricted work experience, geographical mobility, high
education, social isolation, and sexual status all be brought
under one theoretical roof? Second, when the social origins
of audience gratifications have been empirically explored,
more often than not the task has been drastically reduced to
one of examining the role of a few standard demographic
variables-such as sex, age, and social class. Third, media
needs have rarely been visualised as springing from a
combination of multiple and interacting circumstances.
22

Fourth, speculation has largely focused on associations

between certain social position variables and certain gratifi-
cation tendencies. The processes in between, which might
help to forge such links, have been virtually ignored. Finally,
such overarching theory as has appeared in the literature
has been one-sided. Compensatory thinking has largely
dominated the field. The media have been regarded chiefly
as substitute sources of satisfactions blocked for the indi-
vidual by frustrating features of his environment. Audience
gratifications, then, have been explained mainly in terms of
environmental deprivation; the possibility that media use
might occasionally feed on more positive interests and forces
in the individual’s life has been almost totally overlooked.
Fresh light has recently been thrown on some of these
problems by the results of a project based for some years at
the Leeds University Centre for Television Research.33
Designed expressly to investigate the social sources of
media satisfactions, this was based on a survey of approxi-
mately 1,000 British adults who (a) endorsed a set of 32
gratification statements as true or not true of their uses of
newspapers, of television as a medium, and of four recently
viewed TV programmes, and (b) answered many detailed
questions about their social situations. Guided by factor
analyses, the 32 gratification statements were reduced to
four types of media satisfaction, scores for the attainment of
each of which were assigned to each respondent: surveil-
each of which were assigned to each respondent: Surveil-
lance, Curiosity, Diversion, and Personal Identity.4 Asso-
ciations of social background features with these scores
were examined not only variable-by-variable, but also in
accordance with AID (automatic interaction detector) pro-
cedures. The latter analyses were not performed on the
sample as a whole, however, since it was suspected that
work status itself might determine which other background
influences would be most operative for people in different
situations. The AID analyses were therefore conducted
separately on each of three major subsamples: full-time
workers, nonworking housewives, and retired people.
 23

A full summary of the results cannot be provided here,

but two of their implications for further theory development
do merit some comment. First, an attempt to look into the
influence on peoples’ media needs of social circumstances
not often covered by conventional survey variables is ap-
parently well worth the effort. In the Leeds study, measures
of this kind were often involved in significant AID splits of
the main media satisfaction scores. One example that can
be mentioned is ownership or not of a telephone. Lack of
such a facility was often associated with higher Diversion
and Personal Identity scores. Moreover, having no tele-
phone was more significant for individuals living at home all
day-housewives and retired people-that in the case of
full-time workers. Among such housebound groups, it
mattered more for individuals of non-manual than of
manual background, a class distinction that was particu-
larly marked among the housewives. It was as if the depri-
vation arising from lack of a telephone, then, was felt more
keenly by middle-class women, some of whose peers may
use it as an instrument of more or less daily social contact.
Other examples of hitherto little studied social background
factors, which occasionally explained significant variation
in media satisfaction scores, included geographical mo-
bility, organisational affiliations, various indices of social
contact opportunities, and various facets of people’s work
situations. When use of television for Diversion was exa-
mined among full-time workers, for example, the two
highest-scoring groups turned out to be (a) women profes-
sing an instrumental rather than an expressive orientation
to their work and (b) older people who felt dissatisfied
with their jobs. The lowest-scoring group comprised individ-.
uals who were expressively oriented to work and highly
satisfied with their jobs, range of social contacts, and
opportunities to get out of the house.
Second, the Leeds survey findings prompted a quite
comprehensive reconceptualisation of the relationship
between people’s social situations and their media-related
needs. The evolution of this rethinking process can be
24

traced through four tables. Table 1 lists all the study’s

social background variables, subdivided according to the
categories under which they were originally grouped. It can
be seen that they were at first classified along common-
sense lines as: primary demographic particulars, social
contact opportunities, variables of work experience, mea-
sures of leisure behaviour, and a miscellaneous set of
&dquo;other variables.&dquo;
Table 2 provides a summary overview of the AID results.
This was arrived at by adding up the total amount of vari-
ance accounted for by each social position variable in each
of the four main gratification areas (disregarding for this
purpose subsample distinctions and differences between
satisfactions gained from television and the press). Entries
in the chart, then, list those variables which definitely
appeared to account for relatively high proportions of varia-
tion in media satisfaction, falling roughly within the top
three-eighths of the batting order for each gratification
area.
displayed in Table 2 already sounds a strong
The pattern
warning against the previously mentioned tendency to think
of audience involvement in the mass media as chiefly a
compensatory affair. It is true that a mainly compensatory
pattern shines through the variables listed in the chart
under the Diversion heading (emphasising a lack of youth,
education, organizational membership, social contacts,
foreign travel opportunities, telephone, and car). It may also
seem unsurprising that it is largely absent from the items
listed under Surveillance (emphasising high education,
middle-class social status, organisational affiliation, foreign
travel, geographical mobility, and no felt need for more
social contact). But the patterns for Curiosity and Personal
Identity provide more interesting test cases of the validity of
a compensatory perspective on the origins of media needs.
Curiosity, for example, goes with, among other things,
higher education, organisational affiliations, experience of
travel abroad, frequent contact with friends, and an ability
 25

TABLE 1
Initial Classification of Social Position Variables Examined for
Associations with Media Satisfactions
 26

TABLE 2
Variables Accounting for Relatively High Proportions of
’

Variance in AID Analyses of Social Position by

.
Media Satisfaction Scores

to get out in the

evening frequently. Personal Identity goes
with organisational affiliation, being geographically mobile,
living in large households, and relatively frequent interac-
tion with other people. Intriguingly, it also goes and quite
 27

strongly, as it happens-with a desire for more social

contact. Thus, it seems that in many cases the relationship
between real-life situation and media satisfaction can be a
more-the-more, not always a less-the-more one. And some
gratifications, like Personal Identity, can be a hub of both
compensatory and supplementary relationships to indica-
tors of real-life opportunities and circumstances.
A further contemplation of these relationships resulted in
Table 3, which outlines our attempt to reorder the back-
ground variables for their impact on media satisfaction.
Three broad categories emerged from this attempt-with a
further split for the middle category of the scheme. Thus, .
we postulated, there may be, first of all, normative influ-
ences’on what individuals aim to get out of media fare. By
virtue of a certain lifecycle position or a certain place in
the social structure, certain expectations that people in
those situations will go more for certain types of satisfaction
and less for others are as if imposed on the individual. It
may be socially expected, for example, that men will be
more cognitively oriented to mass media provision than
women. Notice, incidentally, how this category opens the
study of media gratifications to a socialisation perspective:
individuals may learn from forces in their social environ-
ment which satisfactions people like themselves are expect-
ed to derive from media use.5 Second, the socially distribut-
ed life-chances an individual enjoys may have a bearing in
two opposed ways. Some will be factors which liberate the
individual, or are indicators of the possession of enabling
experience that facilitate a more rich involvement with
media contents. Organisational affiliation and frequency of
social contact might operate in this way. Other factors,
however, are sources of a need to compensate for the lack
of such opportunities and capacities-as in, say, lack of a
telephone, a car, or a satisfying job. Last, the subjective
reaction or adjustment of the individual to his situation,
whatever it may be, may be relevant to what he seeks to
obtain from the media.
28

TABLE 3
Framework forRe-ordering Relationships Between Social
Background and Media Satisfaction

This typology not only reflected an attempt to order the

linkages of social background factors with media satisfac-
tions along other than merely ad hoc lines. Once attained,
its utility was also put to a further empirical test. We had
postulated that the satisfactions obtained from television
viewing would tend more often to be of a compensatory
kind, while those obtained from newspaper reading would
tend more often to be of the facilitating, outer-world involv-
ing, more-the-more variety. This hypothesis was first
suggested by the discovery that sample members’ rates of
actual mass media use seemed to show that the deprived, in
some sense or other, individuals more often watched TV,
while the more socially active individuals tended to read
newspapers more often. Table 4 illustrates the outcome of a
direct test of this intermedium difference hypothesis. It can
be seen that it was confirmed for three of the four gratifica-
tion score areas: Surveillance, Diversion, and Personal
 29

TABLE 4
Comparison of Roles of AID Splitting Variables for
Newspapers and Television

Identity. That is,when for each gratification score on each

.
medium we calculated the proportion of explained variance
assignable to the variables we have classified as normative
influences, facilitating factors, factors requiring compen-
sation, and subjective reactions, respectively, the press
scores were more often detemined byfacilitating influences
and the television scores by compensatory ones.

TOWARDS A MEETING GROUND

WITH CULTURAL STUDIES?-

Katz’s (1959) hope that students of popular culture and

investigators of audience gratifications would get together
has proved stubbornly illusory. As a result, some items on
the uses and gratifications agenda remain in a state of
&dquo;unfinished business.&dquo; As Carey and Kreiling (1974),
writing from a cultural studies standpoint, have observed,
&dquo;Uses and gratifications research fails to link the functions
of mass media consumption with the symbolic content of
the mass-communicated materials or with the actual
experience of consuming them.&dquo; And as Swanson (1976)
has noted, such neglect contradicts the approach’s own
emphasis on the active audience. How else might such
activity be more suitably manifested than in the process of
30

arriving perceptions and interpretations of the meanings

at
of mass media contents? .

But can a marriage be arranged between the cultural

studies and uses and gratifications approaches, and, if so,
on exactly what terms? Themselves deeply ambivalent in
their attitude towards this question, Carey and Kreiling
underline the difficulties involved in trying to answer it
convincingly. They steer an erratic course between affirm-
ing the desirability of a merger and airing strongly-held
suspicions that the fruits of any such union would only
prove abortive. Sometimes they welcome uses and gratifi-
cations researchers as suitable partners to join forces with
students of popular culture in the pursuit of common tasks.
At other times they depict them as almost wholly disquali-
fied to enter what is treated as a strictly bounded and near-
sacrosanct cultural domain. Presumably that is why some of
their stipulations and conditions read like terms not for a
rapprochement, but for a takeover bid. Redemption awaits
only those uses and gratifications researchers who are
prepared to change all their spots.
It is true that several bridge-building suggestions are
scattered throughout the essay. Even the complaint that
uses and gratifications researchers have never seriously
examined &dquo;mass communication as a system of interacting
symbols and interlocked meanings that somehow must be
linked to the motivations and emotions for which they
provide a symbolic outlet&dquo; presupposes that such linkages
exist and could profitably be explored. Unfortunately, this
idea is not developed and is overwhelmed instead by a view
of cultural studies as a self-contained and immaculate
pursuit. Such uncompromising insistence on the unique
properties of cultural studies recurs at many stages of the
Carey-Kreiling analysis. For example, they will have no
truck with behaviouralism in either its causal or its func-
tional form. But such a wholesale rejection seems to rule
out the investigation of linkages between meanings and
motivations, an analysis of which would presumably neces-
 31

sitate the measurement of variation on both sides of the

cognitive/conative divide. This sort of position is even
more firmly asserted in Carey’s other writings. In &dquo;Mass
Communication Research and Cultural Studies: An Ameri-
can View&dquo; (Carey, 1977), for example, he categorically
declares that cultural studies &dquo;does not seek to explain
human behavior but to understand it ... does not seek to
reduce human action to underlying causes or structures
but to interpret its significance ... does not attempt to
predict human behavior but to diagnose human meanings.&dquo;
’
Yet another example of the same outlook may be found in a
passage in the 1974 essay with Kreiling, which obliges uses
and gratifications researchers to accept-as a first pre-
condition of moves toward accommodation-that &dquo;an effec-
tive theory of popular culture will require a conception of
man not as psychological man or sociological man but as
cultural man.&dquo; Notice how these models are treated not as
complementary but as opposed alternatives. It is from this
standpoint, of course, that the essay criticises the reduction
of cultural experience by uses and gratifications research-
ers to matters of tension reduction and role performance.
The bald conclusion is inevitable: &dquo;The underlying uses and
gratifications logic is inadequate for study of popular cul-
ture.&dquo; Further doubts about merger prospects also arise
from Carey and Kreiling’s understanding of the essence of
aestlietic experience. In contrast to the utilitarianism of
uses and gratifications thinking, which is said to fit mass
media use to a &dquo;means-ends model&dquo; of human activity,
they proclaim the need to approach aesthetic values and
interests as if essentially consummatory in character.
Such issues are too profound for resolution in the span of
but a few paragraphs. But surely the heart of the matter,
which such philosophical reflections may actually tend to
obscure, is whether a patch of common ground does exist
that students of audience gratifications and popular culture
could till together without jeopardising their respective
forms of integrity. Some sketch of its likely contours might
32

begin to emerge by recalling how some of the earliest uses

and gratifications studies showed how certain media
materials spoke to the condition of their most loyal fans.
The italicized phrase has been chosen advisedly. According
to Herzog (1944) and Warner and Henry (1948), the appeals
of radio soap opera, for example, stemmed in part from
how they spoke to their listeners’ (house-bound house-
wives) conditions (presenting the housewifely role, then, in
a certain light through the characters that symbolised it, the
situations they inhabited, and the problems they coped
with). Similarly, a British uses and gratifications study of
The Dales (also a day-time radio serial) traced some of its
appeals to the projection of meanings capable of being
assimitated to listeners’ own values and circumstances
at a quite deep level (Blumler, Brown, and McQuail, 1970).
For example, one cluster that emerged from fans’ endorse-
ments of a battery of reasons for liking to listen to The Dales
reflected the program’s &dquo;Reinforcement of Family Val-
ues.&dquo; Another stood for a &dquo;Reinforcement of the Social Role
of Women.&dquo; Overall, the programme was highly appreciated
for its projection of a moral conservatism that older women
associated with the standards of their own generation. Yet
by injecting into the plots examples of such social problems
as illegitimacy, homosexuality, infidelity, and so on, the
series seemed to help some listeners to come to terms with
potentially disturbing modern trends from within the shelter
of a relatively secure normative perspective.
Implicit in such studies we may find the elements of a
conceptual framework which might provide some of the
terms of that elusive marriage contract between research-
ers into popular culture and audience gratifications. Its
point of departure would be the idea that audience mem-
bers familiar with certain materials come to form percep-
tions of what they have to offer. These in turn become their
perceived appeals, which may include perceptions of the
meanings and values conveyed by the materials concerned.
Translated into expectations, these appeals become motives
 33

for attending to the same materials. And if confirmed in

experience they become satisfactions, which will feed back
into the complex of motives for continuing to consume
them. Meanwhile, audience members’ social roles help to
shape their preceptions of such meanings and in this way
also feature among the forces motivating attendance.
It is true that in order jointly to build on such elements
as these, both parties would have to give a higher priority
than heretofore to the task of exploring the meanings that
audience members ascribe to selected portions of media
output. Theorists of popular culture would have to. be
prepared occasionally to shift their gaze from texts so as to
focus it on reader, listeners, and viewers. Investigators of
audience gratifications would have to put questions to
people not only along the lines of &dquo;What are your reasons
for viewing this programme?&dquo; but also of the kind &dquo;What
about it do you find true-to-life? What does it seem to you to
stand for? What picture of the world does it seem to con-
vey ?&dquo; But if such questions
as these can be meaningfully
raised with audience members, the prospects for jointly
undertaking an exciting research venture are promising.
The twofold aim of such an enterprise would be (a) to un-
ravel how far, and in what ways, perceptions of content
meanings contribute to media motivations, and (b) to as-
certain Ihow such perceptions, together with their motiva-
tional implications, vary across different audience sub-
groups, on the one hand, as well as across different content
genres, on the other.

NOTES

1. It is such a body of shared elements that Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1974)
sought to identify in their definition of the uses and gratifications paradigm. Work-
ers in this tradition, they said, "are concerned with (1) the social and psychological

origins of (2) needs, which generate (3) expectations of (4) the mass media or other
sources, which lead to (5) differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement
in otheractivities), resulting in (6) need gratifications and (7) other consequences,
perhaps mostly unintended ones."
34

2. The work of Nordlund (1976) strongly suggests the presence in less educat-
ed audience members of gratification orientations that may inhibit knowledge
acquisition.
3. The research was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Michael Gurevitch
and Professor Denis McQuail. Ms. Gayle Dyckoff and Ms. Peggy Newton also
served the project in the early stages of its development. Computer analyses
were organised by Mr. Alan Geekie.
4. The Personal Identity statements are itemised in the fourth paragraph of the
third section of this paper. The statements representing the other forms of media
satisfaction were as follows:

Surveillance:
—I use it to understand what is going on in the country and the world.
—I can use it to keep up with what the government is doing.
—It helps me to judge what political leaders are really like.
Curiosity:
—I can use it to find out about things I need to know about in my daily life.
-It helps me to satisfy my sense of curiosity.
—It shows me what society is like nowadays.
—It makes me want to learn more about things.
Diversion:
-It helps me to relax.
—It’s a good way of passing the time when I don’t feel like doing anything else.
—It sometimes gives me a good laugh or cry.
—It helps me to get away from everyday worries.
-It helps me when I want to be cheered up.
—It’s a good thing to turn to when I’m alone.
5. Adoni (1976) has fruitfully applied a socialisation perspective to the study of
media gratifications among Israeli adolescents.
6. The line of thought developed in this section profited from prior discussion
with Professor Denis McQuail.

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Jay G. Blumler is Research Director of the Centre for Television Research

and Reader in Mass Communications at the University of Leeds, England.