Loneliness, Gender, and Parasocial Interaction: A Uses and Gratifications Approach

Abstract

This study investigates how unfulfilled interpersonal needs due to loneliness are met by mediated communication, specifically through parasocial interaction. Emotional (family and romantic), social, chronic, situational, and transient loneliness are differentiated. Different types of loneliness are expected to predict different uses of parasocial interaction, with gender serving as a moderator of these effects. Based on a college-student sample (N = 154), social loneliness was negatively related to the use of parasocial interaction. Gender interacted with family, romantic, and chronic loneliness in predicting parasocial interaction. For women, greater family loneliness predicted greater parasocial interaction, whereas for men the effect was negative. For men, greater chronic loneliness led to more parasocial interaction, whereas for women this effect was negative. Finally, for men, greater romantic loneliness was associated with less parasocial interaction, whereas for women this relationship was slightly positive. The findings were interpreted in terms of the uses and gratifications perspective, which relates interpersonal and mass communication.

Keywords:

• Chronic Loneliness
• Emotional Loneliness
• Gender
• Parasocial Interaction
• Social Loneliness
• Situational Loneliness
• Transient Loneliness

Notes

Note. For situational loneliness, the number of males = 54 and the number of females = 86.

Note. N is between 140 and 148. Variables are untransformed; see endnote 2.

∗p < .05; ^† p < .01.

Sex and gender may be two different terms in some research, especially in interpretivist and critical paradigms. Wood (2007) argued that sex is determined by chromosomal make-up (XX for women and XY for men), whereas gender is a socialization product. In this study, sex and gender are not differentiated for two reasons. First, sex has a large influence on gendered behaviors (Wood, 2007). Second, research on the relationship between gender and media typically has used biological sex as the only indicator of gender. For these reasons, gender and sex were not distinguished.

Three of the loneliness measures (for family, social, and transient loneliness) were significantly non-normal. These three measures were transformed as follows:

1. transformed family loneliness = −(family loneliness + 0.5)⁻¹;

2. transformed social loneliness = −(social loneliness + 0.5)⁻¹;

3. transformed transient loneliness = (transient loneliness + 0.5)^2.75.

These transformations made these variables more normally distributed. For example, the skewness of family loneliness went from − 1.609 (before transformation) to 0.668 (after transformation). The corresponding values for social loneliness are −1.672 (before) and 0.329 (after), and for transient loneliness, −0.836 (before) and −0.672 (after).

The set of correlations between the types of loneliness computed using the transformed variables was approximately of the same magnitude as the corresponding set of correlations using the untransformed variables; therefore, Table 2 and the text report the correlations among the untransformed variables.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qi Wang

Qi Wang (PhD, University of Maryland, 2006) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Villanova University.

Edward L. Fink

Edward L. Fink (PhD, University of Wisconsin, 1975) is a professor

Deborah A. Cai

Deborah A. Cai (PhD, Michigan State University, 1994) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland