Media Consumption and Human Values: An investigation into how media consumption has changed human values pre and post Internet.
Rachel Bottrill
Danni Horsley
Stuart Armon
Abstract
This research examines the relationship between media consumption (newspaper and Internet) and millennial human value change over-time. We explore the themes of media consumption and values (Schwartz 1992) and compare them against two specific dates. Our chosen timestamps are 2004 and 2016, with data we retrieved from the European Social Survey (ESS). We will have data from 2004 as it is post Internet, and then we will benchmark these results against 2016, where Internet and the use of social media is more a prevalent part of people's lives. We believe it is important to investigate this as there is a lack of research and understanding in academic literature about the role certain mediums have when influencing millennials human values. Therefore, we believe that our research into this will help future practitioners understand more about how media consumption can impact human values. Our findings suggested that there is, in fact, a lack of significant relationships between our media consumption independent variables and human value change. However, our research did indicate a negative relationship with Self-Transcendence and Self-Enhancement with millennials when they read, watch or listen about news on politics. We were also able to conclude that in 2016 men and women changed some of theirhuman values, however, it wasn’t as a result of our independent variables (media consumption). We therefore conclude by recommending that further research can be produced to understand why these changes in human values occurred with men and women, and that further research will need to be done using other independent variables.
