ACTION SAMPLING OF TELEVISION VIEWING:

A FAVORITE WASTE OF TIME

Lennart Sjöberg

Center for Risk Research

Stockholm School of Economics

Sweden

and

Department of Psychology

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Trondheim,Norway

(ljsoberg@fastmail.fm)

Rutger Magneberg

Datagram HB

Göteborg

Sweden

Online Publication Date: April  16, 2007

Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 12, No. 2, Spring 2007

Abstract

TV watching is one of the most important ways of spending leisure time, the average daily watching time in the Swedish population is about 141 minutes – about 15 % of non-sleep time. Yet, there is little research on the psychological processes taking place while watching TV. In the present study using still-relevant data from a 1985-86 data base, the cognitive and emotional functions of TV watching in everyday life were investigated by means of a random action sampling procedure. TV watching was characterized by a high level of happiness and relaxation, own initiative, a long time span, closeness to goal, commonness, and easiness. It was characterized by a low level of negative emotions, concentration, expected value of outcome, activation, level of intention and presence of others. TV watching thus emerges as an activity, which mainly provides some pleasant relaxation. It is common, easy to do and done in relative solitude. It is a somewhat interesting activity, but it stimulates little concentration and involvement. It is regarded as an obstacle to the pursuit of other goals. The relevance of the results for the present situation with regard to TV is discussed.

Key words: experience sampling method, action sampling, television, emotions, interest, involvement
 

Introduction

It is important to study action in the natural, everyday environment to understand how people spend their lives, and why they choose to do what they do. Knowledge about what people do, and how their actions influence their subjective world of emotions and thoughts, is important as a first step towards a theoretically based understanding of how they are affected by, and affect, their social and psychological ecology. Since relatively little work has been done in psychology on the naturally occurring behavior of people, there is little systematic knowledge about these matters. An exception is afforded by the work on ecological psychology (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989), but it is now largely forgotten and never had any sizable influence on mainstream psychology (Georgiou, Carspecken, & Willems, 1996; Scott, 2005). More recently, there is growing interest in the experience sampling method (ESM) (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987; Hormuth, 1986; Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983) in very diverse fields of behavioral science, such as management (Ilies, Scott, & Judge, 2006; Miner, Glomb, & Hulin, 2005), developmental and clinical psychology (Forbes et al., 2006; Pieters et al., 2006), sport psychology (Cerin & Barnett, 2006) and, indeed, ecological psychology (Larson & von Eye, 2006). Both intra- and interindividual variability can be reliably studied with this type of method (Cranford et al., 2006). Kahneman et al. have devised a variation on the approach, which requires participants to rate experience from memory, rather than at the moment when it happens (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004).

In our previous work, an  action sampling method (ASM)  was developed and applied in a number of studies (Magneberg, 1995, 1998; Sjöberg, 1981; Sjöberg & Magneberg, 1987, 1990)[1]. It is different from the experience sampling method (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983) in its broader coverage of both emotional and cognitive aspects, and in focusing on moral aspects and depth of intention. Our previous work gave an over-all picture of the actions and emotions of people from a variety of categories and backgrounds. The basic idea of the method is to base sampling on actions that people carry out   and to investigate the momentary emotional and cognitive reactions or interpretations that people have in connection with their actions. It should be noted that actions are sampled as they happen in the ongoing stream of activity of everyday life. Action sampling diverges from the behavior setting analysis developed within ecological psychology (Schoggen, 1989) in being directly focused on behavior, as distinct from studying factors (behavior settings) influencing behavior.

In the present paper, interest is focused on what is possibly the most important and frequent leisure time activity: TV viewing. In the USA, in 2005, adult women watch TV on the average 5hrs and 17 minutes per day, men 4 hrs and 31 minutes[2], a level reached already in the middle of the 1980s. Comparable Swedish data is 2 hrs and 21 minutes as of May 20062  a lower level, but still very high. The average viewing time per person in Sweden was 2 hrs and 21 minutes.

There is a wealth of knowledge about which programs are chosen and by whom (Condry, 1989; McIlwraith, Jacobvitz, Kubey, & Alexander, 1991). There is also some knowledge of how the introduction of TV changes beliefs and habits (Bandura, 1994; Jeffres, 1994), e.g. with regard to their beliefs concerning threats and risks (af Wåhlberg & Sjöberg, 2000), and the effects of TV on daydreaming and creativity (Valkenburg & Vandervoort, 1994). There is work on personality and TV watching, see e.g. Finn (Finn, 1997), McIlwraith (McIlwraith, 1998) and Pierce (Pierce, 2005). Heavy TV users appeared to be psychologically maladjusted (Oliver & Armstrong, 1995). According to Wiebe (1970), TV watching has the function of relieving stress. Sensation seeking was unrelated to the amount of TV watching (Potts, Dedmon, & Halford, 1996). There also seems to be an association between heavy TV viewing and prejudice (Shrum, 1999). Children to parents with a low level of education watched more TV than others (Truglio, Murphy, Oppenheimer, Huston, & Wright, 1996). This work, however, is insufficient to answer the question why people watch TV[3] and what psychological effects TV watching have. The present study had the purpose of contributing to the analysis of this problem.

The study utilized a technique of random sampling of action described by Sjöberg and Magneberg (Sjöberg, 1981; Sjöberg & Magneberg, 1990). Using this technique, participants carried a pager for 7 consecutive days and were paged 5 times a day (between 8 am and 10 pm), at randomly chosen points in time. When paged, they were instructed to fill out a questionnaire asking them about what they did at that particular moment, the reasons for their action(s), and a number of mood and emotion related questions. 

The technique allows for the mapping of everyday behavior. It was found by Sjöberg and Magneberg that it gave data in good accordance with other data collected by means of retrospective diaries from a representative sample. The present approach differs from sociological and economic attempts at the description of everyday behavior in being much more data rich with respect to the details of each particular action.

Csikszentmihalyi and Kubey reported a study of TV watching (Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey, 1981; Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). They found that television viewing in the USA "was consistently tied to relaxation, to weaker cognitive investments, and to lower feelings of potency when compared to other activities" (pp. 325-326). They likened television viewing to the consumption of alcohol. Our own previous work on the psychological antecedents and effects of drinking alcohol in everyday life (Magneberg & Sjöberg, 1995) partly support their suggestion in this respect.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the antecedents and effects of TV watching in time samples of ordinary, everyday behavior. We use a methodology, which differs in some important respects from that used by Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey, 1981; Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)., as explained below in the methods section. In addition, our study concerned a quite different TV system from the U.S. system studied by them.

The data analyzed here were collected between October 1983 and May 1985. The current Swedish TV system is still dominated by the same two state controlled channels as in 1983-85. These channels conduct a similar program policy, i.e. a combination of American entertainment (mostly movies), quiz programs and their own "debate" programs about political problems. The two main news programs are the same and aired at the same times. There is one main change, though, in the sense that there is now also a commercial channel which is widely available. It policies are somewhat more oriented towards entertainment. There are also cable channels (pay-TV), which reach a limited fraction of the public. The total time spent watching TV is not much different now, although some young people spend much time surfing on the Internet, chatting or playing computer games.

Methods

Participants

There were 152 participants who took part in the project for a small fee. They reported data from 4839 actions. Forty-nine percent were women and 51 were men. Age varied between 18 and 65 with a median of 35. Further details are given elsewhere (Sjöberg & Magneberg, 1990).

Procedure

Each participant was given 35 copies of the questionnaire, a pocket size pager and written instructions regarding five points of time each day for seven subsequent days. The pager made it possible to reach all participants simultaneously anywhere in Sweden by means of the FM broadcasting network. Transmitting times for the signals were selected at random, after having divided the day into five time periods. Every signal sent to the participants was initiated by the investigator. Participants did not know in advance when to expect a signal.

The participants were instructed to carry the pager from the time they woke up until the time they went to bed, with the qualification that no signals were to be transmitted before 8 a.m. or after 10 p.m. When the signal was received, the participants were to register and evaluate what they were doing at that very moment, preferably immediately, but otherwise as soon as it was convenient. They were to use the questionnaire and answer all of the questions. Filling out the questionnaire took about 10 minutes. The participants were instructed to try to ignore the fact that they were carrying the pager and to carry on with everyday life as normal.

Questionnaire

The questionnaire, reproduced in Appendix 1, contained 30 questions, some of which had sub-questions. There were two main types of questions - open questions and rating scales using 5 categories (see Appendix). In the former category, the participants were first asked to state what they were doing when the signal arrived, and if they were doing something else simultaneously. Then they were asked about their location and what the goal of their action was. The final open question at the beginning of the questionnaire was to which consequences they believed the main action would lead. At the end of the questionnaire, they were asked to state, if possible at four levels of abstraction, the reasons they had for performing the action stated. The answers to the open questions were coded according to a constructed schedule with a large number of categories for each question.

For each of the four questions in the last part of the questionnaire where the participants were asked to give a "deeper" explanation of each action, they were asked to rate to what extent the action was carried out:

-  For what it might lead to (instrumental action - goal orientation)

-  For its own sake (consummatory action - value orientation)

-  Because of external circumstances (situational causation -situational orientation)

The actions were coded by two persons. The actions were categorized into 34 categories, the reasons into 99 and the expected consequences into 76. In our earlier study (Sjöberg & Magneberg, 1990) a reliability test of the answers to the open questions was performed. Both coders then recoded a sample of 30 actions five months later. They had formerly coded half of these themselves and half had been coded by the other coder. The within judge reliability was .76 and .60 respectively, and the between judges reliability was .81 and .61 respectively.

            The data was collected in 1983-85, a time with a different TV system as compared to the present one. The possible importance of the differences between the earlier and current TV systems is commented upon in the concluding discussion section.

The methodology used here was partly similar to the one devised by Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), but there were some important differences, see Appendix 2 for a detailed comparison. Aspects covered by us and not by Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi included:

1.   We probed the intentional depth of the actions, and goal-directed actions more generally.

2.      We asked about moral aspects of the action.

3.      We included items about how well liked the action was, and how difficult it was.

4.      We asked about basic emotions, not only about moods.

5.      One of our items asked about frequency of the action.

Items used by Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi but not by us asked about activities carried out in the time interval before the current “beep” and after the previous “beep.” Memory problems may have interfered with the data here, just as in the Kahneman et al. methodology briefly mentioned in the introduction. They also included some items about potency that we did not include, although our questionnaire did have items covering expected result of the action, and its easiness/difficulty.

Summing up the comparison, our methodology was clearly much more oriented towards understanding and describing action while the approach of Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi was to sample and describe experience in terms of mood (but not emotions).

                                                              Results

The data consisted of information on 4839 randomly sampled actions. Of these 524 (10.8 percent) involved watching TV, either as the primary (445) or secondary (79) action[4]. This number is an estimate of how much time people spend in front of the TV screen, of the time period sampled. The figure 10.8 percent is possibly somewhat smaller than the proportion of time spent by watching TV at the present in Sweden, which is about 15 percent as indicated above. One of the 8 groups of participants consisted of people sampled at random from the population in Göteborg. In that group, 12.6 percent of the actions involved TV watching.

TV watching was a less social activity than most others were. The mean number of others present was 1.22, as compared to 2.68 for non-TV actions (p<0.0005). TV watching was also judged as a more frequent action than other actions; mean ratings of frequency were 3.94 and 3.80, respectively, p < 0.003. The scale was defined as 1=”Very infrequent” and 5 =”Very frequent”.

A comparison was made between TV watching and all other actions. There were several significant differences, most of them highly significant. The mean values in the mood dimensions for TV and not TV are given in Fig. 1. Fig. 2 gives mean emotion ratings.

Figure 1. Mean mood ratings: TV and non TV. Scale 1-5.

Figure 2. Mean emotion ratings: TV and non TV. Scale 1-5.

The emotion scales went from 1=”Not at all” to 5 =”To a great extent.” The size of the differences, on standardized scales, as well as outcomes of t-tests of the mean differences between TV watching and non-TV related activity, are given in Table 1.

The most pronounced difference was found in the scale Active; many differences were small in spite of being highly significant.

When it came to mood, TV watching was thus found to be a relaxed and passive activity with some positive feelings attached to it. With regard to emotions, TV watching was connected with a smaller level of negative emotionality than non-TV. Note that this finding refers to the emotions experienced while watching TV. The actions were also rated on a number of evaluation scales, see Fig. 3.

Figure 3. Mean ratings of evaluation scales: TV and non-TV.

Means and outcomes of t-tests are given in Table 2. The over-all picture is quite straightforward: watching TV was seen as unimportant, with no positive results expected, easy to perform but something to regret. It was neither liked nor disliked more than the average of other actions. It hindered the achievement of other goals, yet it was due to one’s own free decision, and one could leave easily. There was little time stress while watching TV.

Action profiles

The mood/emotion and cognition/interpretation variables were entered into a factor analysis. Five factors accounting for 49.8 percent of the variance were extracted and subjected to direct oblimin rotation. See Table 3 for the pattern matrix, which was the result. (Factor loadings less than 0.3 are not shown).