Soap Opera as a GUIDING LIGHT – Effects and Gratifications of Watching Soaps
There are many reasons why people watch daytime serials. A few will be explored in this article. As with any medium, consumption is bound to have some effects on the audience. The purpose here is to explore what effects men and women perceive soaps are having on them and on other people.
The charge is often made that people watch soaps to escape from reality. (The survey results from the previous section revealed that soap watchers are very much in favor of seeing soap plots focusing on real life social issues.) One of the survey statements was, "I watch soaps to escape from reality." Fifty percent of women chose disagree while the rest were split among strongly disagree, undecided, and agree. The men were practically evenly split among undecided, disagree, and strongly disagree. It is not surprising that some women picked agree because many researchers have theorized that soap operas are manifestations of female fantasies. Hence, even the title of Tania Modleski's book (a quarter of which is devoted to soap operas) is Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women.
For the most part, traditional female concerns have dominated the stories. Males often play secondary roles. They are often "helpless" when it comes to being seduced by conniving villainesses. All this was much truer in the days of radio soap operas, but some people still contend that these influences linger to this day. This would explain why some women watch soaps to escape from reality. Through soaps, they get to be a part of a female dominated world instead of the male dominated worlds in which they live during the rest of the day.
When asked if watching soaps help them deal with problems at school or at work (one question), as well as problems in personal relationships (a separate question), ninety percent of both male and female respondents chose either disagree or strongly disagree to both questions. Ninety-five percent of both female and male respondents chose strongly disagree or disagree when asked if they purposely face problems the way they know a soap character would.
One researcher concluded, "Learning (e.g. information seeking, advice, help with problems, orientation, reality exploration) is frequently cited as a motive, but is often unrelated to student exposure levels or the association is small." (Babrow 156)
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