Uses and Gratifications:

Denis McQuail, Jay Blumer, Elihu Katz, Joseph Brown, Michael Gurevitch and Hadassah Haas.

Research into this area began with McQuail and Blumer in 1969 where they studied the 1964 UK Election. They were later joined in the early 1970s by Katz, Brown, Gurevitch and Haas.

The distinction is this approach is rather than categorising the audience as passive consumers of messages, either directly from source, or from opinion leaders, this theory recognises the decision making process of the audience themselves. As Katz explains the Uses and Gratifications theory diverges from other media effect theories that question “What does media do to people?” to focus on: “What do people do with media?”

They put forward research to show that individual audience members are more active than had previously been thought and actually key to the processes of selection, interpretation and feedback. Individuals sought particular pleasures, uses and gratifications from individual media texts, which can be categorised as:

1. information / education
2. empathy and identity
3. social interaction
4. entertainment
5. escapism

Or categorised as: diversion, personal relationships, personal identity and surveillance.

Personal needs:

1. understanding self
2. enjoyment
3. escapism

Social needs:

1. knowledge about the world
2. self confidence/esteem and stability
3. strengthen connections with friends/family

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

It is suggested that much of this research was informed by Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs (1954), which argues that people actively looked to satisfy their needs based on a hierarchy of social and psychological desires. Maslow’s thinking was centred around Humanistic psychology. According to the web page ‘Humanist Psychology’ (link here) the basic principle behind humanistic psychology is simple and can be reduced to identify the most significant aspect of human existence, which is to attain personal growth and understanding, as ‘only through constant self-improvement and self-understanding can an individual ever be truly happy‘. In other words Humanistic psychology focuses on each individual’s potential and stresses the importance of growth and self-actualization. The fundamental belief of humanistic psychology is that people are innately good and that mental and social problems result from deviations from this natural tendency.