By 1944, researchers began to look into the earliest forms of uses and gratifications with their work classifying the reasons why people chose specific types of media.
[17] Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch synthesized that UGT's approach was focused on "the social and psychological origins of needs, which generate expectations of the mass media or other sources, which lead to differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities), resulting in need gratifications and some other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones.
"[7][18] In 1969 Jay Blumler and Denis McQuail studied the 1964 election in the United Kingdom by examining people's motives for watching certain political programs on television.
By categorizing the audience's motives for viewing a certain program, they aimed to understand any potential mass-media effects by classifying viewers according to their needs.
[17] A 1974 study by Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch stated five basic assumptions for a framework for understanding the correlation between media and audiences.
[19] Mark Levy and Sven Windahl identified three types of audience activity, which they labeled as preactivity, duractivity, and postactivity.
In brief, it suggests that media use is motivated by needs and goals that are defined by audience members themselves, and that active participation in the communication process may facilitate, limit, or otherwise influence the gratifications and effects associated with exposure.
UGT researchers are developing the theory to be more predictive and explanatory by connecting the needs, goals, benefits, consequences of media consumption and use along with individual factors.
[citation needed] In their study, they found that correlations between individual GS and non-corresponding GOs were generally much lower, indicating considerable promise for a sought versus obtained conceptualization of uses and gratifications.
[24] Palmgreen et al. conducted an investigation in 1985 that provides support for a process model of uses and gratifications based upon an expectancy-value approach.
The results also displayed gender differences, implying that social and societal expectations for females around independence and connection were a factor in their uses and gratification seeking.
This reduces uncertainties that arise from homogenizing an Internet audience and explaining media usage in terms of only positive gratifications.
LaRose also created measures for self-efficacy and self-disparagement and related UGT to negative outcomes of online behavior, such as internet addiction.
Results show that enjoyment, physical activity, nostalgia, image, normative influences and flow drive various forms of user behavior.
[42] Research has shown that media taken in for entertainment purposes have a wide range of uses and emotional gratifications,[43] and that these are not mutually exclusive but can overlap with each other.
[44][45] Another emotional gratification is affective disposition, which involves people experiencing gratificaition when rooting for characters depicted as good and moral.
[46] Other emotional gratifications include excitation transfer,[47] sensation seeking,[48] downward social comparison,[49][50] mood adjustment,[51][52] and competence.
[71] Building on UGT, Social Cognitive Theory helped distinguish GS versus GO stimulus for media consumption.
[33][72] Cultivation theory is concerned with understanding the role that media – specifically television – plays in shaping a person's world view.
The model was originally rooted in 1930s behaviourism and was largely considered obsolete for a long time, but big data analytics-based mass customisation has led to a modern revival of the basic idea.
Ruggiero wrote that "most scholars agree that early research had little theoretical coherence and was primarily behaviorist and individualist in its methodological tendencies.
He stated, "The issue to be considered here is whether what has been thought about Uses and Gratifications Theory has been an article of faith and if it could now be converted into an empirical question such as: How to measure an active audience?"
Blumler then offered suggestions about the kinds of activity the audiences were engaging with in the different types of media: utility, intentionality, selectivity, and imperviousness to influence.
[18] Severin and Tankard also argued that most of the data collection method used in uses and gratification studies are self-report questionnaires, which is not a reliable way to ascertain the genuine reason for using the media because they believe that individuals can not respond accurately to questions about their own feelings and behavior.