relationships: parasocial ao3 Flashcards
Research support for absorption addiction
P: There is support for the predictions of the absorption addiction model.
E: Maltby (2003) linked types of personality to levels of parasocial relationships. He found that extraverts were more likely to be at the entertainment-social level, neurotics at the intense-personal level and psychotics at the borderline-pathological level.
E: Further to this, Maltby et al. (2005) measured the relationship between celebrity worship and body image in teenagers and found that young girls who were at the intense- personal level tended to have a poor body image, especially if they particularly admired a celebrity’s physical appearance.
L: Both studies support the model because they confirm the prediction of a correlation between the level of celebrity worship and poor psychological functioning.
Could also link to practical application eg psychoreducation ab body image
Lack of support for attachment explanations
P: There is a lack of support for attachment theory explanations.
E: McCutcheon et al. (2006) examined the correlation between attachment type and celebrity worship levels using 229 participants.
E: No link between insecure-resistant attachment and more intense levels of parasocial relationships was found.
L: This contradicts the claim made by attachment theory explanations and suggests that there is no link between attachment type and parasocial relationships.
Methodological limitations in studies into parasocial relationships + correlational
Issues and debates - good cross cultural validity
P: Methodologically, there are also weaknesses of studies into parasocial relationships is that they rely heavily on self-report methods, such as interviews and questionnaires.
E: These methods may not reflect the true picture, as participants may want to answer in a way that reflects them in better light (social desirability bias) and may not respond truthfully to the questions
E: Furthermore, most research into celebrity worship/parasocial relationships is correlational. This means that cause and effect cannot be clearly established, lowering the scientific explanatory power. For example, while a significant correlation was found between poor body image and intensive celebrity worship in teenage girls (Malby et al., 2005), this does not mean, that intense celebrity worship causes poor body image. It may as well be that girls who already have a poor body image tend to engage in a more intensive level of parasocial relationships to enhance their self-esteem.
L: This means that the reasons for developing parasocial relationships may be different from the ones uncovered by research, which lowers the validity of these explanations, making them less applicable to real life.
