According to uses and gratifications theory (UGT), people use media because they derive specific gratifications from media consumption. The term media refers to communication channels or tools, such as newspapers, radio, or television, and more recent new media, based on the Internet, including social media, which allow the creation and sharing of information by way of virtual communities and
Blumler and Katz published the Theory of Uses and gratifications in 1974. Blumler, communication and media theorist, and Katz, a sociologist and communication scientist, challenge other communication theories like the media effects model. The media effects model saw the audience as passive media users, which focused the research on how media
Rubin (1994) outlines the potential for U&G to explain consequences of media use by stating that "concepts such as needs, motives, uses, and gratifications sought are used in an equivalent manner as antecedents to behavior; effects, consequences, gratifications obtained, and outcomes appear as consequents of the behavior" (p. 424). When
Uses and gratifications theory has generally been used to understand what motivates people to consume media (e.g. Albarran et al. 2007; (Armstrong et al. 2015)—and so we can begin to utilize uses and gratifications theory to not only explain, but predict, media use behaviour. After all, finding a relationship between two constructs helps
The concept of social identity gratifications (SIG) arose out of the integration of social identity theory and uses and gratifications theory in order to explain how social group identification was related to media use and perceptions (Harwood, 1997, 1999). Social identity theory proposes that our personal identities are made up of social group
Uses and gratifications (U&G) theory has been traditionally adopted to study and explain the socio-psychological motives for and gratifications of social media use and their subsequent impacts on the attitude and behavior of users (Park et al., 2009, Raacke and Bonds-Raacke, 2008, Wang et al., 2012). Given that birdwatching and conservation
Variance explained by the model: R 2 =0.263 (26.3%) R 2 =0.320 (32%) Interestingly, broad social media use motives produced strong effects, which is in line with findings from uses and gratification theory (Blumler and Katz, 2020), for instance showing that among others, social motives play an important role in understanding social media
The uses and gratifications theory is perhaps one of the most reinvented communication theories, due to the accelerated technological innovations that have been influencing ways of Several theories have been proposed to explain the relationship between communication and music, as well as the wide range of dimensions and theoretical concepts
Uses and gratifications theory has also been used extensively within the study of politics and the dissemination of political messages (Blumler and McQuail, 1969; McLeod and Becker, 1974). While widely used in other disciplines, uses and gratifications theory can also be relevant in helping to explain social media uses.
Researchers employed the uses and gratifications theory in this case to reveal a nuanced set of circumstances surrounding violent media consumption, as individuals with aggressive tendencies were drawn to violent media. Because the media is one of the most important gauges of public opinion, this theory is often used to explain the
