Customer Reviews

Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience (Routledge Communication Series)

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This is one of the most intense and empirical studies of how people relate to television (not focusing on television's content), nothing judgmental here folks, the data is presented in text and charts. We get to see the surveys, the responses, we are informed of the study methods used...

Various psychological traits are measured before, during, and after television viewing in the subjects homes. Things like concentration, cheerfulness, challenge, memory, and other traits are measured at various times using a self-reporting mechanism. The merits and faults of the methods used to study the subjects are also discussed. The book is intense.

I'm sorry I can't encapsulate it better than this. The authors (Mihaly and Robert) do an extremely admirable job of presenting the information in a readable and complete format.

Again, it should be stressed that this study was empirical. No judgements are made. Content of television was not part of the study, content of the subject's psyches was.

A landmark work.

This book is an exploration into the effect television has on the viewer's state of mind. The organization and style of the book read very much like a dissertation that has been reworked slightly for publication. The style of writing is very academic, and is geared to academic rather than general audiences. The first two chapters are pure literature review covering information reception and previous research about television viewing. The next chapter discusses the research methods. The main study involved a group of about 100 adults living near Chicago in the 1970s, who were asked to keep activity and mood diaries over the course of a week. The data from this study were combined with data from a number of other studies that examined television viewing habits of mostly Americans and Canadians. The remaining chapters cover various aspects of the results and discussion, including: how television fits into the scheme of leisure time, how television affects viewer's moods, how television affects family life, why some people view more than others, uses of television, television and marketing, and television and personal growth. As with a dissertation, sources are cited within the text and each chapter has extensive endnotes for further explication and references. The questionnaires used in the study are reproduced in the appendices. A full list of references is included, as well as an author index and a subject index.

So what did they find out from their study about viewers in the 1970s? First, participants in the study watched about 1.4 hours of TV each day, which represented 6.6% of the participants' total waking hours. TV viewing was the most time-consuming activity engaged in at home, and TV viewing absorbed 40% of all leisure time, or another way to look at it, 25% of all time spent at home was spent watching TV. Ninety-three percent of TV viewing occurred in one's own home. Most viewing occurred between 7:30 and 10 PM on weekdays. Twenty percent of the time, people watched TV because they had nothing better to do, giving TV the highest nothing-better-to-do ranking of major home activities including reading, eating, cooking, chores, talking, and grooming.

People tend to watch more TV when they are in a bad mood or when they just want to relax with something mindless. When compared to work, other leisure activities, or meals, participants reported that TV required the least concentration, challenge, and skill of all, and people were most passive when watching TV than when engaging in any other leisure activity. Watching TV had the lowest mood and activation ranking of fifteen common daily activities that included such items as resting, transit, and chores. When compared to sports and other leisure activities, it was found that TV required much less concentration during the activity, and that participants found it harder to concentrate after watching TV than before they began. TV viewing is quite relaxing while participants engage in it, but once they turn the set off, they tend to feel less relaxed than when they began, which is the opposite of what happens with sports and other activities. Marketers are well aware of the fact that people watch TV for relaxation and try to keep people in front of the set by offering soothing or entertaining programs rather than material that will require concentration or upset viewers. The difficulty that people have eliminating TV viewing altogether from their lives suggests that some aspects of TV viewing may be addictive.

For the most part, I found the results of the study to be quite predictable- -we all hear from many sides that TV viewing is not good for our mental health. There were a few interesting points that Kubey and Csikszentmilhalyi uncovered that weren't fully explored, however. They note that families that watch more TV tend to get along better, and posit that one possible reason for this could be that TV watching helps to diffuse tensions, as well as provide an activity whose skill level is so low that children and adults can participate in it together. The authors note that surprisingly, the most well-adjusted teenagers have the highest levels of viewing, but they point out that teenagers with problems don't tend to spend a lot of time at home, and since most TV viewing is done in the home, there is probably no cause-and-effect link between level of adjustment and TV viewing. They note that heaviest viewers tend to be women living alone and married men living with families (married women with families give up some of their potential TV viewing time to do housework). Elsewhere in the book, they note that Blacks seem to watch more than Whites, and that viewing time increases with education. I have a hunch, however, that the most educated people in their study may have been precisely those married men whose wives were doing the housework, and that their level of education was predicted by their gender, and that their gender and family status determined how much TV they watched, not their level of education. It would have been worth it to pair up people of different family status and similar educational backgrounds to see if the observation that educated people tend to watch more TV really holds water.

By now, the data from the study are quite dated, with our cable TV possibilities far out-numbering the 3 major networks of the 1970s, as well as the advent of the Internet and development of the computer game industry to compete for leisure time with TV watching. It would be quite interesting to re-do the study in light of these developments, to see how TV relates to our leisure time and mental state today.

This is a wonderful book! It also with Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television have inspired much of my research and thought.

Take steps towards enhancing the quality of your life - explore FlowNet and exchange ideas and experiences associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory @ http://www.flownetwork.com

Take steps towards enhancing the quality of your life - explore FlowNet and exchange ideas and experiences associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory @ http://www.flownetwork.com