UNDERSTANDING AUDIENCES, CONTINUING CONTRIBUTIONS OF GRATIFICATIONS RESEARCH

The uses and gratifications approach takes audience members' motivations for attending to mass media as its vantage point for understanding media exposure and effects. A voluminous corpus of social-scientific research conducted over more than fifty years has established that audience members are drawn to media in order to achieve particular gratifications, that gratification-seeking influences not only selection of media content but also the way persons affectively and cognitively relate to the content, and shapes the consequences of exposure as well. Recent work has endeavored to reveal the social and psychological influences that give rise to gratification-seeking and to locate gratification-seeking in its natural context of media attitudes and behaviors that collectively shape the effects of media exposure. In the future, uses and gratifications research is likely to continue to expand its horizons and to contribute to related approaches to media and audiences, but fundamental political, theoretical, and methodological differences will prevent an alliance with the new ethnographic approaches to critical and cultural audience studies. © 1993.