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Selective Versus Passive Television Viewing

Two quite different assumptions have been made about television viewers. Most critics of the medium as well as researchers working in the "effects" tradition generally assume that viewers are passive, simply "watching what is on". In marked contrast, researchers working in the "uses and gratifications" tradition conceive of viewers as actively choosing what to see and what to attend to while the set is on. A good deal of support has been adduced for passive viewing and for active viewing as well. For the former see Wilensky (1964), Goldsen (1977); Mander (1977), Winn (1977), Gerbner and Gross (1979), Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey (1981), and Barwise et al (1982). For the latter see Frank & Greenberg (1980), Greenberg & Frank (1983), Palmgreen (1984) and the works reviewed in Rosengren et al (1985). Initially articulated as mutually exclusive alternatives, some on either side of the active versus passive controversy now see it as a false dicotomy. Blunder (1979), for example, suggests that the degree of activity may vary from person to person and from situation to situation. Others have suggested that "activity" can take a number of different forms. For example, a person may choose one program over another; may attend to some parts of a program and not to others; and may subsequently recall some and not other elements (Levy 1983; Levy & Windahl (1985). The research reported here takes advantage of a 1982 United States national survey that, among other things, asked respondents whether they regularly choose to watch each of thirteen types of television programming over other types. With this information, it is possible to address the two key issues in the debate over passive versus active viewing. First, it is possible to asses the degree to which heavy viewers report actively choosing among alternative types of programming. Second, it is possible to see whether heavy viewers who choose one or another of the alternative patterns of programming all equally well fit the profile of heavy viewers as socially and culturally disadvantaged (Gerbner and Gross, 1979; Hughes, 1980; Gerbner, 1984; Gross, 1984; Hawkins & Pingree, 1984).