UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Values of German media users : 1986-2007 Mahrt, M. Publication date 2010 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Mahrt, M. (2010). Values of German media users : 1986-2007. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:27 Sep 2021 Values of German Media Users 1986‐2007 Merja Mahrt Values of German Media Users 1986-2007 ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D. C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op vrijdag 19 maart 2010, te 12:00 uur door Merja Mahrt geboren te Kiel, Duitsland Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. K. Schönbach Overige Leden: Prof. dr. P. C. Neijens Prof. dr. E. S. H. Tan Prof. dr. D. Sikkel Prof. dr. L. W. Erbring Prof. dr. V. Gehrau Faculteit der Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen Acknowledgements A word of thanks goes out to all the people who have supported me and this project over the last four years—in so many different ways that it would be impossible to name them all. It is equally difficult to honor all the ways in which Klaus Schönbach has helped make this thesis become a reality. As an ASCoR PhD-supervisor, as a German Doktorvater, as an in many ways not-so-German Lehrstuhlinhaber to whom I have been the assistant, and as someone with whom I enjoyed literary discussion over dinner in a town so unlike Amsterdam or Berlin, you have provided incredible encouragement. Thank you, Klaus. I am indebted to the Amsterdam School of Communications Research and its members for funding the lion’s share of this research and giving an external PhD student great opportunities to participate in conferences and workshops and get valuable feedback for her work. The department for media research of ZDF funded another important part of this project; Dr. Heinz Gerhard and Dr. Ursula Dehm have personally supported it. Dr. Rüdiger Schulz, Dr. Johannes Schneller and Astrid Reiner of the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach equally deserve recognition for their support of this study. Through their work, Dr. Udo Michael Krüger and his team at the Institut für empirische Medienforschung have provided a valuable framework for the interpretation of the analyses presented here. My colleagues and friends at Zeppelin University have been great in making work—and life—worthwhile in the strange place called Oberschwaben. Especially my all-time favorite officemate Markus has been a constant reminder to keep on track. Heike, Oliver, Remigius, Ulrich, Alexandra, Marian, Andreas, Kay, Anne, Annemarie, Barbara and Alihan, it has been a real pleasure to work with you, share coffee breaks and make Fischbach, in the words of our beloved president, seem a bit like Friedrichshain. I still would love to finally give Bernd an answer to his question, ‘so how are the values?’ Aleksandra, the literary circle was a genius idea; thank you for all those who inspired wonderful discussions that had nothing to do with values or mass media. 5 My family and friends far away from Lake Constance have shown extraordinary patience with me for not calling them back, missing their birthday parties and much too often not being in the mood to talk. Anna and Philipp and many more have managed to still make me feel connected to my favorite ‘zitty.’ Thank you all so much. Finally, Jens, I cannot possibly do justice here to what you have done for and meant to me throughout the entire PhD process. Maybe just this: You were there for me during the inevitable Adrian-moments and it is thanks to you that I even know what that means. And I am sure you do, too. Merja Mahrt 6 Summary Values of German media users, 1986-2007 Values have been discussed in connection to the changes brought to the German TV landscape since the introduction of the dual system in 1984. Yet, on such occurrences arguments have rarely, if at all, been based on reliable information about differences in televised values. Nor have values of the audience of channels or genres been considered. This study offers a starting point for such an endeavor, focusing on the role values play for people’s media choices. In a theoretical overview, values are situated in a framework of overlapping spheres that influence people in the adoption of values. Social learning is the main mechanism behind this process of socialization. Values define what is desirable or not and how one should behave in a given situation according to the rules of one’s society. As stable basic traits close to an individual’s personality, values play a part in the building of motives that finally result in behavior. With regard to media, a well-established gratification of media use is the reinforcement of one’s own values and worldviews. Based on the finding that mediated value patterns differ across outlets and types of content, I assume that different values should lead people do prefer different media over others. In a secondary analysis of large annual surveys representative for the German population, relationships between people’s personal values (social and materialist ones) and their use of print newsmedia, television channels and genres are studied from 1986 to 2007. I have found hints toward correspondence between values presented in media, use of these media and values of the users. I see these consistencies as due to selective exposure, with people turning to media (contents) that would confirm rather than question their personal values. In particular, I have found small, but systematically recurring effects of individual values on TV genre preferences as well as on use of TV channels and print outlets. Generally speaking, social values tend to lead to reading newspapers and newsmagazines, left-wing ones being a little more preferred than conservative titles. On the other hand, people with strong materialist values favor conservative 7 outlets and commercial television. Education plays a role in this respect as the highly educated seem to be more media-savvy when it comes to choosing outlets that match their values. As for genres, social values go along a preference for genres that present these same values more often, such as family series and medical dramas, or that offer information for people who like to be up to date about what is going on in the world and in their society. Materialist people were more interested in entertainment and arousing contents. Some of these relationships actually mirror what value patterns are typical of the respective outlets or genres. So values seem to be part of the clear expectations that the audience holds of media genres. Another focus of this study is the considerable expansion of the German media system over the last 25 years. One could expect to find that a broader offer enables people to choose contents that fit their needs—and also the underlying values—better than in a more limited media environment. However, hardly any systematic trends over time could be observed. At least use of the outlets and genres studied here has not changed much with regard to viewers’ values, although competition increased significantly over the period studied. A possible explanation is that I focused on general interest TV channels and general news outlets, which may not try to accommodate audience niches with special value priorities. As for the relationships of values and genre preferences, during the twelve years under study, the German TV landscape mainly grew in terms of special-interest channels. These need not have affected the general- appeal offer of the four largest stations examined here. The latter continued to exist next to new stations and probably still offered reliable gratifications to viewers used to them. Consequently, the audience may not have selected those stations more according to their values than before. A comprehensive study of televised value patterns within channels and genres could help to investigate these findings further. In a final step, interactions between genre preferences and TV-channel use were analyzed. Some genres seem to match some channels better than others, at least in the eyes of media users. Thus the relationships between channel use and personal values can be reinforced for people who like genres that are specific to a given channel. I have documented the indirect relationships between values, preference for genres and channel use through path analysis. Here, public-service versus commercial channels were differently related to most genres, and I have illustrated that for some types of content (action/adventure versus arts/culture) even opposite patterns exist. 8 Use of channels partly depends on genre preferences and seems to reflect what genres are “typical” of a specific channel.