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Living in a sitcom: an explanation of the reasons for watching sitcoms

Köhne, J.A. (2012) Living in a sitcom: an explanation of the reasons for watching sitcoms.

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Abstract:Watching television is an important part of our daily life. One format on TV that gets more and more popular is the sitcom. A sitcom is a situation comedy with a particular group of characters and based on situations that could arise in everyday life. This research explains what the reasons for the success are and why people like to watch this kind of comedy. The dependent variable is how much episodes an individual is watching during one week, because it was estimated that the more people “like” (or the more they have a reason) to watch a sitcom, the more episodes they would watch. The independent variables are motives for watching (entertainment, relaxation, habitual pass time, companionship, social interaction), the level of parasocial interaction and the level of identification with a media character. Altogether, 86 respondents participated in this study and filled in a questionnaire concerning these dependent and independent variables. The results show that especially the variable motives is a significant predictor for the amount of watched episodes during one week. The factors relaxation and social interaction are most influential. Besides that, the factor humour is a significant predictor for the amount of watched episodes. Also the factor parasocial interaction has a relationship with the amount of watched episodes.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:77 psychology
Programme:Psychology BSc (56604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/63243
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