Audience Research: Cultivation Analysis
AUDIENCE RESEARCH: CULTIVATION ANALYSIS
The stories of a culture reflect and cultivate its most basic
and fundamental assumptions, ideologies, and values.
Mass communication is the mass production, distribution,
and consumption of cultural stories. Cultivation analysis,
developed by George Gerbner and his colleagues,
explores the extent to which television viewers' beliefs
about the "real world" are shaped by heavy exposure to
the most stable, repetitive, and pervasive patterns that
television presents, especially in its dramatic
entertainment programs.
These differences often illustrate a phenomenon called
"mainstreaming," which is based on the idea that
television has become the primary common source of
everyday culture of an otherwise heterogeneous
population. From the perspective of cultivation analysis,
television provides a relatively restricted set of choices
for a virtually unrestricted variety of interests and publics;
its programs eliminate boundaries of age, class, and
region and are designed by commercial necessity to be
watched by nearly everyone.
Cultivation analysis is one component of a long-term,
ongoing research program, called Cultural Indicators,
which follows a three-pronged research strategy. The
first, called "institutional process analysis," investigates
the pressures and constraints that affect how media
messages are selected, produced, and distributed. The
second, called "message system analysis," quantifies
and tracks the most common and recurrent images in
television content. The third, cultivation analysis, studies
whether and how television contributes to viewers'
conceptions of social reality.
"Mainstreaming" means that heavy television viewing
may erode the differences in people's perspectives which
stem from other factors and influences. Mainstreaming
thus represents a relative homogenization and an
absorption of divergent views and a convergence of
disparate viewers. Cultivation researchers argue that
television contributes to a blurring of cultural, political,
social, regional, and class-based distinctions, the
blending of attitudes into the television mainstream, and
the bending of the direction of that mainstream to the
political and economic tasks of the medium and its client
institutions.
First implemented in the late 1960s, by the mid-1990s
the bibliography of studies relating to the Cultural
Indicators project included over 300 scholarly
publications. Although early cultivation research was
especially concerned with the issue of television
violence, over the years the investigation has been
expanded to include sex roles, images of aging, political
orientations, environmental attitudes, science, health,
religion, minorities, occupations, and other topics.
Replications have been carried out in Argentina,
Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary,
Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Sweden,
Taiwan, and other countries.
The methods and assumptions of cultivation analysis
were designed to correct for certain blind spots in
traditional mass communication research. Most earlier
studies looked at whether individual messages or genres
could produce some kind of change in audience attitudes
and behaviors; in contrast, cultivation sees the totality of
television's programs as a coherent system of messages,
and asks whether that system might promote stability (or
Cultivation has been a highly controversial and
provocative approach; the results of cultivation research
have been many, varied, and sometimes counterintuitive.
The assumptions and procedures of cultivation analysis
have been vigorously critiqued on theoretical,
methodological, and epistemological grounds; extensive
debates and colloquies (sometimes lively, sometimes
heated) continue to engage the scholarly community, and
have led to some refinements and enhancements.
Some researchers have looked inward, seeking cognitive
explanations for how television's images find their way
into viewers' heads, and some have examined additional
intervening variables and processes (e.g., perceived
reality, active vs. passive viewing). Some have
questioned the assumption of relative stability in program
content over time and across genres, and emphasized
differential impacts of exposure to different programs and
types. The spread of alternative delivery systems such as
cable and VCRs has been taken into account, as has the
family and social context of exposure. Increasingly
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Audience Research: Cultivation Analysis
generational shifts) rather than immediate change in
individuals. Whereas most research and debate on, for
example, television violence has been concerned with
whether violent portrayals make viewers more
aggressive, Gerbner and his colleagues claimed that
heavy exposure to television was associated with
exaggerated beliefs about the amount of violence in
society.
Cultivation analysis is not concerned with the impact of
any particular program, genre, or episode. It does not
address questions of style, artistic quality, aesthetic
categories, high vs. low culture, or specific, selective
"readings" or interpretations of media messages. Rather,
cultivation researchers are interested in the aggregate
patterns of images and representations to which entire
communities are exposed--and which they absorb--over
long periods of time.
Cultivation does not deny the importance of selective
viewing, individual programs, or differences in viewers'
interpretations; it just sees these as different research
questions. It focuses on what is most broadly shared, in
common, across program types and among large groups
of otherwise heterogeneous viewers. No matter what
impact exposure to genre X may have on attitude Y, the
cultivation perspective argues that the consequences of
television cannot be found in terms of isolated fragments
of the whole. The project is an attempt to say something
about the more broad-based ideological consequences
of a commercially-supported cultural industry celebrating
consumption, materialism, individualism, power, and the
status quo along lines of gender, race, class, and age.
None of this denies the fact that some programs may
contain some messages more than others, that not all
viewers watch the same programs, or that the messages
may change somewhat over time.
The theory of cultivation emphasizes the role that storytelling plays in human society. The basic difference
between human beings and other species is that we live
in a world that is created by the stories we tell. Great
portions of what we know, or think we know, come not
from personal or direct experience, but from many forms
and modes of story-telling. Stories-from myths and
legends to sitcoms and cop shows-tend to express,
define, and maintain a culture's dominant assumptions,
expectations, and interpretations of social reality.
Television has transformed the cultural process of storytelling into a centralized, market-driven, advertisersponsored system. In earlier times, the stories of a
culture were told face-to-face by members of a
community, parents, teachers, or the clergy. Today,
television tells most of the stories to most of the people,
most of the time. Story-telling is now in the hands of
global commercial conglomerates who have something
complex and demanding statistical tests have been
applied. The paradigm has been implemented in at least
a dozen countries besides the U.S.
The literature contains numerous failures to replicate its
findings as well as numerous independent confirmations
of its conclusions. The most common conclusion,
supported by meta-analysis, is that television makes a
small but significant contribution to heavy viewers' beliefs
about the world. Given the pervasiveness of television
and even light viewers' cumulative exposure, finding any
observable evidence of effects at all is remarkable.
Therefore, the discovery of a systematic pattern of small
but consistent differences between light and heavy
viewers may indicate far-reaching consequences.
In sum, cultivation research is concerned with the most
general consequences of long-term exposure to centrallyproduced, commercially supported systems of stories.
Cultivation analysis concentrates on the enduring and
common consequences of growing up and living with
television: the cultivation of stable, resistant, and widely
shared assumptions and conceptions reflecting the
institutional characteristics and interests of the medium
itself and the larger society. Understanding the dynamics
of cultivation can help develop and maintain a sense of
alternatives essential for self-direction and selfgovernment in the television age. The cultivation
perspective will become even more important as we face
the vast institutional, technological, and policy-related
changes in television the 21st century is sure to bring. Michael Morgan
FURTHER READING
Bryant, Jennings. "The Road Most Traveled: Yet Another
Cultivation Critique." Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media (Washington, D.C.), 1986.
Carlson, James M. Prime Time Law Enforcement: Crime
Show Viewing and Attitudes Toward the Criminal Justice
System. New York: Praeger, 1985.
Gerbner, George. "Toward 'Cultural Indicators': The
Analysis of Mass Mediated Message Systems." Audio
Visual Communication Review (Washington, D.C.), 1969.
Gerbner, George. "Communication and Social
Environment." Scientific American (San Francisco,
California), 1972.
Gerbner, George. "Cultural Indicators: The Third Voice."
In, Gerbner, G., L. Gross, and W.H. Melody, editors.
Communications Technology and Social Policy. New
York: John Wiley, 1973.
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Audience Research: Cultivation Analysis
to sell. Most of the stories we now consume are not handcrafted works of individual expressive artists, but massproduced by bureaucracies according to strict market
specifications. To be acceptable to enormous audiences,
the stories must fit into and reflect--and thereby sustain
and cultivate--the "facts" of life that most people take for
granted.
For the Cultural Indicators project, each year since 1967,
week-long samples of U.S. network television drama
have been recorded and content analyzed in order to
delineate selected features and trends in the overall
world television presents to its viewers. In the 1990s, the
analysis has been extended to include the FOX network,
"reality" programs, and various new cable channels.
Through the years, message system analysis has
focused on the most pervasive content patterns that are
common to many different types of programs but
characteristic of the system of programming as a whole,
because these hold the most significant potential lessons
television cultivates.
Findings from the analyses of television's content are
then used to formulate questions about people's
conceptions of social reality, often contrasting television's
"reality" with some other real-world criterion. Using
standard techniques of survey methodology, the
questions are posed to samples of children, adolescents,
or adults, and the differences (if any) in the beliefs of
light, medium, and heavy viewers, other things held
constant, are assessed. The questions do not mention
television, and respondents' awareness of the source of
their information is seen as irrelevant.
The prominent and stable over-representation of well-off
white males in the prime of life pervades prime time.
Women are outnumbered by men at a rate of three to
one and allowed a narrower range of activities and
opportunities. The dominant white males are more likely
to commit violence, while old, young, female, and
minority characters are more likely to be victims. Crime in
prime time is at least 10 times as rampant as in the real
world, and an average of five to six acts of overt physical
violence per hour involve well over half of all major
characters.
Cultivation researchers have argued that these
messages of power, dominance, segregation, and
victimization cultivate relatively restrictive and intolerant
views regarding personal morality and freedoms,
women's roles, and minority rights. Rather than
stimulating aggression, cultivation theory contends that
heavy exposure to television violence cultivates
insecurity, mistrust, and alienation, and a willingness to
accept potentially repressive measures in the name of
security, all of which strengthens and helps maintain the
prevailing hierarchy of social power.
Gerbner, George, and Larry Gross. "Living With
Television: The Violence Profile." Journal of
Communication (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 1976.
Gerbner, George, and Larry Gross. "Editorial Response:
A Reply to Newcomb's 'Humanistic Critique.'"
Communication Research (Beverly Hills, California),
1979.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and
Nancy Signorielli. "The 'Mainstreaming' of America:
Violence Profile No. 11." Journal of Communication
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 1980.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and
Nancy Signorielli. "A Curious Journey Into the Scary
World of Paul Hirsch." Communication Research
(Beverly Hills, California), 1981.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and
Nancy Signorielli. "Charting the Mainstream: Television's
Contributions to Political Orientations." Journal of
Communication (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 1982.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and
Nancy Signorielli. "Growing Up With Television: The
Cultivation Perspective." In, Bryant, J. and & D. Zillmann,
editors. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and
Research. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum,
1994.
Hawkins, Robert P. and Suzanne Pingree. "Television's
Influence on Social Reality." In, Pearl, D., L. Bouthilet,
and J. Lazar, editors. Television and Behavior: Ten
Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the 80s:
Volume II, Technical Reviews. Rockville, Maryland:
National Institute of Mental Health, 1982.
Hirsch, Paul. "The 'Scary World' of the Nonviewer and
Other Anomalies: A Re-analysis of Gerbner et al.'s
Findings of Cultivation Analysis." Communication
Research (Beverly Hills, California), 1980.
Melischek, Gabriele, Karl Erik Rosengren, and James
Stappers, editors. Cultural Indicators: An International
Symposium. Vienna, Austria: Verlag der
Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984.
Newcomb, Horace. "Assessing the Violence Profile of
Gerbner and Gross: A Humanistic Critique and
Suggestion." Communication Research (Beverly Hills,
California), 1978.
Morgan, Michael, and James Shanahan. Democracy
Tango: Television, Adolescents, and Authoritarian
Tensions in Argentina. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton
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Audience Research: Cultivation Analysis
Cultivation is not a linear, unidirectional, mechanical
"effect," but part of a continual, dynamic, ongoing
process of interaction among messages and contexts.
Television viewing usually relates in different ways to
different groups' life situations and world views. For
example, personal interaction with family and peers
makes a difference, as do real-world experiences. A wide
variety of socio-demographic and individual factors
produce sharp variations in cultivation patterns.
Press, 1995.
Ogles, Robert M. "Cultivation Analysis: Theory,
Methodology, and Current Research on Televisioninfluenced Constructions of Social Reality." Mass Comm
Review (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 1987.
Potter, W. James. "Cultivation Theory and Research: A
Conceptual Critique." Human Communication Research
(New Brunswick, New Jersey), 1993.
_______________. "Cultivation Theory and Research: A
Methodological Critique." Journalism Monographs
(Austin, Texas), 1994.
Signorielli, Nancy, and Michael Morgan, editors.
Cultivation Analysis: New Directions in Media Effects
Research. Newbury Park, California: Sage, 1990.
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