How Involved Do Soap Audiences Get?
To find out how involved viewers become with their shows, they were asked in the survey for this article if they get emotional about problems characters have on soaps they watch. Half the men and women agreed, while the other half disagreed. There were no undecided answers in this category.
That relates to an amusing story in the history of soap operas. Dr. Louis Berg, a New York psychiatrist, decided in 1941 that radio soaps were responsible for "tachycardia, arrhythmia, emotional instability, and vertigo." To put his theory to the test, he listened to one episode each of two radio serials and monitored his own blood pressure over the half hour. (Each radio soap was fifteen minutes long.) His blood pressure increased. From that isolated incident, he concluded that not only was he right about all the previous symptoms he had ascribed to soap opera listening, but also that, "Serials are dangerous to their unfortunate addicts, especially to the middle-aged woman, the adolescent, and the neurotic." (Edmondson and Rounds 13)
No doubt, poor Dr. Berg would be disappointed to know that some sixty-five years later people are still getting emotional about soap operas despite his passionate warning!
This section ends on a note of irony. Respondents were asked if soap operas are an important part of their lives. Twenty percent of males agreed while the other eighty percent disagreed and one hundred percent of all women disagreed. Obviously, nobody of either gender was undecided.
Clearly, most respondents claim that soap operas are not an important part of their lives. Other portions of the data analysis detailing the number of hours spent per week watching soap operas and the number of years that respondents have been watching tell a very different and revealing story.
One female survey taker indicated she watched seventeen hours of soap operas per week and another woman said she watched twenty-one and a half hours per week. (What would they have done before the days of VCR's, TiVo, Digital Video Recorders, and SOAPnet?) Still, both of these women (like all surveyed women) answered that soaps are not an important part of their lives. Who are they kidding? They spend about one and a half times as many hours per week watching soap operas as the average college student spends in class per week. Apparently, the once strong stigma against watching soap operas, or at least admitting their importance to a person, still lurks unresolved in a few minds.
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