DEPENDENCY RELATIONS AND NEWSPAPER READERSHIP

Newspaper readership often has been studied with the aim of developing demographic profiles of readers. This paper considers the goals readers are pursuing and the importance of media system dependency relations in explaining the amount of time spent reading newspapers. In a regression analysis, we find that dependency relations for social and self understanding explain a considerable amount of variance in readership beyond the variance explained by demographic variables. Differences in the dependency relations between more and less affluent readers, as well as between male and female readers, are noted as well.