Uses and Gratifications: Development and Basic Tenets Research into the reasons why individuals use mass media dates back more than 50 years. Early forms of gratifications research attempted to understand why people used certain media content. In the process, it explored the functions of the media and the role of the audiences' needs and expectations (e.g., Herzog, 1940; Lazarsfeld & Stanton, 1941; Lazarsfeld & Stanton, 1949). These early studies preceded any formal conceptualization of the uses and gratifications paradigm later proposed by Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch (1974) and Rosengren (1974). Instead of asking what effects the media have on individuals and collective audience behavior, the questions were, what are people seeking and what do they believe they are deriving from mass media? According to Katz (1959), "it is the program that asks the question, not 'What do the media do to people?,' but 'What do people do with the media?'" (p. 2). In more familiar terms, "Ask not what the media can do to people, but what the people can do with media." The uses and gratifications paradigm provides one way of conceptualizing the relationship between the producer of messages (sender) and the audience (receiver). It presents a departure from the powerful (direct) effects models of communication research that dominated the field of communication between 1930-1960 and to some extent still dominates the field today. Volumes three and four of the Journal of Communication (1993) trace the history of this debate in detail and reveal ongoing concerns in the field. Notions of "all-powerful media"—a-la Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922), Phantom Public (1925) and Lasswell (1927) Propaganda Techniques in the World War—in the wake of World War One, Hitler's rise to power, and the impending Stock Market crash, helped to usher in the theory of uniform effects (direct effects), where individuals were perceived as passively receiving messages from the media in the same fashion and reacting to them in a similar manner. The primary focus of such early research was on short-term, measurable changes in attitudes and behaviors. In this paradigm, the media were perceived as agencies of mass impression capable of molding attitudes and behavior in accordance with a centralized authority. Media messages were "magic bullets" piercing the minds of the populace, who might best be conceptualized as "helpless victims" (Bryant & Zillmann, 1994, p. 92). Lasswell (1927) suggested the "hypodermic needle" model to describe this process whereby messages were injected into passive receivers. Consequently, and crucial to the discussion of uses and gratifications research that follows, human agency was greatly diminished. Through the work of the "founding fathers" of communication study—Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, Lewin, Hovland, Schramm, and others (Rogers, 1994, pp. xi-xii)—there was a growing emphasis on the evaluation of scientifically measurable behavioral effects. Lasswell's 5-stage model—"Who, Says What, In Which Channel, To Whom, With What Effect"—(1948, p. 37) firmly embedded itself in the psyche of communication study during its early years of development. Contrary to the direct effects tradition, others around this same time suggested the presence of intervening variables between media messages and effects and attributed a much more active role to the audience. Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet (1948) in The People's Choice introduced the notion of indirect or limited effects with their examination of voting behavior in Eerie County, Ohio. In their two-step flow model, messages no longer traveled directly from producers (senders) to receivers via a particular channel of communication with direct effects. Instead, messages were first communicated to opinion leaders who then interpreted and passed on the messages to others in face-to-face communication. Individuals were perceived as active (or at least more active than previously perceived) and selective in their use of media. It was argued that messages intended to persuade actually reinforced existing opinions (e.g., see also Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). These findings would eventually lay the groundwork for researchers such as Klapper (1960) in The Effects of Mass Communication, who proposed the existence of interceding elements between a message and one's response to the message. Such factors included individual predisposition, selective perception, interpersonal channels, group norms and opinion leaders. In other words, media were no longer perceived as the necessary or sufficient causes of audience effects as imagined by Lasswell and other direct effects theorists. The media message was only one factor of influence among many in the total psychological and sociological environment. By 1963, Klapper was already calling for an expansion of uses and gratifications research arguing that research has "too frequently and too long focused on determining whether some particular effect does or does not occur" (Klapper, 1963, p. 517). Krippendorff (1993) traces the uses and gratifications paradigm to propaganda effects studies during World War Two and to Berelson (1949), who studied what missing the newspaper meant to strike workers. Such inquiries into the "social and psychological needs, sources of expectations, and gratifications derived from mass media attendance" eventually led to Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch's (1974) formulation of media use (p. 36). Contrary to some of the earliest studies of media functions conducted by Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948)3 and Lasswell (1948)4—who believed that media content had common effects on all individuals in society—Katz and colleagues found that "how audience members used these messages was . . . far from uniformly distributed among audience members. There was no obvious message determinism of effects" as previously envisioned by those in the direct effects tradition (emphasis added) (p. 36). Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch (1974) outlined the basic goals of uses and gratifications as follows: "(a) to explain how people use media to gratify their needs, (b) to understand motives for media behavior, and (c) to identify functions or consequences that follow from needs, motives, and behavior" (cited in Bryant & Zillmann, 1994, p. 419). Accordingly, uses and gratifications focused on: "(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 other activities), resulting in (6) need gratifications and (7) other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones" (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974, p. 20). Katz, et al. (1974) and Rosengren (1974) drafted the initial tenets of uses and gratifications. Lundberg and Hulten (1968) referred to these tenets as comprising what might be called a "uses and gratifications model." These tenets have been revised since their initial formulation to reflect subsequent discoveries regarding media use by such scholars as Palmgreen (1984), Rubin (1986), Palmgreen, Wenner and Rosengren (1985), and Wenner (1986), to name only a few. An updated version of the basic tenets was identified by Bryant and Zillmann (1994) in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research: (a) Communication behavior, including media selection and use, is goal-directed, purposive, and motivated [McQuail, Blumler and Brown, 1972]. People are relatively active communication participants who choose media or content. The behavior is functional and has consequences for people and societies.

(b) People take the initiative in selecting and using communication vehicles to satisfy felt needs or desires. Instead of being used by the media, people use and select media to gratify their needs or wants (Katz, Gurevitch & Haas, 1973). Media use may be a response to basic needs, but also satisfies wants or interests such as seeking information to solve a personal dilemma. (c) A host of social and psychological factors mediate people's communication behavior. Predispositions, interaction, and environment mold expectations about the media. Behavior responds to media or messages as filtered through one's social and psychological circumstances such as the potential for interpersonal interaction, social categories, and personality.

(d) Media compete with other forms of communication (i.e., functional alternatives) for selection, attention, and use to gratify our needs or wants. There are definitive relationships between mass and interpersonal communication in this process. How well media satisfy our motives or desires varies among individuals based on their social and psychological circumstances.

(e) People are typically more influential than the media in the relationship, but not always. One's initiative mediates patterns and consequences of media use. Through this process, media may affect individual characteristics or social, political, cultural, or economic structures of society (Rosengren, 1974; Rubin & Windahl, 1986). (emphasis added) (p. 420)

The uses and gratifications theoretical framework resides in a mediated view of communication that stresses the role of social and psychological factors in mitigating mechanistic or direct effects (e.g., Donohew, et al., 1987; Lull, 1980). Media effects are not denied altogether, but explained in the context of the purposes, functions or uses of certain media (i.e., "uses and gratifications") (Fisher, 1978, p. 159). Its focus is on assessing the purposes or functions that the media serve for the active receiver (p. 159). Consequently, it rejects Bogart's (1965) belief that "most mass media experiences represent pastime rather than purposeful activity, very often [reflecting] chance circumstances within the range of availabilities rather than the expression of psychological motivation or need" (cited in Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1973, pp. 510-511). Uses and gratifications, because of its interest in the active audience member, may appear at first blush to overlap with the Critical paradigm of media studies that emerged in the late 1960s via European social theory and the Frankfurt school. While both theoretical positions reject any view of audiences as passive, the differences between them outweigh any perceived similarity. Those within the critical camp are working toward a "sociologically grounded semiotics of the text-reader dialogue," while gratifications researchers are concerned with "how individuals use the media as resources 'to satisfy their needs and achieve their goals'" (Moores, 1993, p. 7). As such, the critical paradigm is a social theory of power, ideology and meaning construction while uses and gratifications is a psychological and sociological theory of human personality that focuses on the functions of the media for individuals. As Livingstone (1990) in Making Sense of Television noted, uses and gratifications research raises the possibility that "meanings available might not translate neatly into meanings received, . . . [but] while the person is accorded some active role, it is purely motivational and not interpretive" (p. 21). Put another way, in the uses and gratifications model, the meanings are not available for negotiation by the audience. Uses and gratifications research in general offers several insights that might apply to the use of CCM radio. For example, Dependency Theory (a type of uses and gratifications research) suggests that a group's dependence on information from a particular medium increases as that medium supplies information that is more relevant or central to that group (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976, pp. 3-21). If listeners perceive CCM radio as incapable of consistently meeting its needs (whatever they may be) or supplying relevant information, they are less likely to become dependent on it as a primary means of gratification. MacFarland (1990) captured this idea when he remarked, "if the listener does not find what he or she wants on your station, he or she will either go searching for it on some other station, or will switch over to nonbroadcast audio sources or to video or even some other medium. But the consumer will be in control. There are now too many choices beside radio to ever act any other way" (p. 49). Moreover, an Expectancy-Value Model of media gratifications views behavior, behavioral intention, or attitudes (or all three) as a function of: "(1) expectancy (or belief)—that is, the perceived probability that an object possesses a particular attribute or that a behavior will have a particular consequence; and (2) evaluation—that is, the degree of affect, positive or negative, toward an attribute or behavioral outcome" (Rosengren, et al., 1985, p. 62). According to Rosengren, et al. (1985), Fishbein's expectancy value theory "is the most prominent and well-specified of the various expectancy-value theories, and its information-processing assumptions are compatible with those of the uses and gratifications perspective" (p. 63). Drawing upon Fishbein's models, they have postulated that "gratifications sought from media experience are a function of both the beliefs (expectations) that audience members hold about media sources and the affective evaluations they attach to media attributes" (p. 63). This model suggests that a particular gratification (e.g., entertainment) will not be sought from CCM radio if CCM radio is not perceived by audiences to possess the related attribute or if the attribute is very negatively evaluated (e.g., most CCM radio stations program too many preaching/teaching programs and not enough music, or the music they do program is not formatically consistent or is poor quality). On the other hand, if the attribute is both strongly believed to be a component of CCM radio and is evaluated very positively, then relatively strong seeking of the appropriate gratification would be predicted. Media consumption thus becomes an interaction between gratifications sought and perceived gratifications obtained.
Some researchers in the expectancy-value tradition have treated expectancies as equivalent to gratifications sought (e.g., Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1973). Palmgreen's (1984) expectancy-value theory stated—in a fashion similar to Fishbein (1963) and Fishbein and Ajzen (1975)—that to determine the extent to which an individual will seek gratification (gratification sought, or "GO") from a particular type of program (in this case CCM radio), one needs to take into account that individual's beliefs about what that medium can provide and his or her evaluation of that medium's content.