
David C GilesUniversity of Winchester · Psychology
David C Giles
PhD
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98
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September 2007 - present
Publications
Publications (98)
This paper introduces the work of the MOOD (Microanalysis Of Online Data) network, an interdisciplinary association of academic researchers exploring ways of conducting close qualitative analyses of online interaction. Despite the fact that much online interaction meets the criteria for ‘conversation’, conversation analysis (CA) has only recently b...
This article sets out to establish the naturalistic study of online social communication as a substantive topic in social psychology and to discuss the challenges of developing methods for a formal analysis of the structural and interactional features of message threads on discussion forums. I begin by outlining the essential features of online com...
This paper explores the phenomenon of boundary crossing between cultural fields and the role that different kinds of capital play in determining whether or not the crossing is a successful one. The fields in question here are those of entertainment (specifically, stand-up comedy) and literature, and the particular boundary crossing is represented b...
This book covers key aspects of parasocial relationships (PSRs), or the relationships people have with media personalities, including fictional characters. The principal feature of a PSR is that it is not individually reciprocated although when the parasocial object is a real person, usually a celebrity, that celebrity often has a reciprocal relati...
Many media users feel as if they are engaging in an interaction or have a personal relationship with people they see in the media. These phenomena are collectively referred to as parasocial experiences (PSEs). This handbook offers a thorough synthesis of the fast-growing, international, and multidisciplinary research of PSEs, not only celebrating t...
There is no doubt that media is a powerful force in the 2020s. On the political scene it exposes the divide between right and left, conservative and liberal, and among various political parties. In the financial world, it informs, persuades, and promotes. It influences religion, family, entertainment...there is little that remains untouched by medi...
This study aims to integrate the literature on social media influencers into a framework that classifies (potential) social media influencers and highlights their features. Previous classifications mainly focused on the measurable characteristics of social media influencers as determined either by scholars or consumers. In reality, though, the soci...
Registered sexual offenders (RSOs) are inevitably on the receiving end of much negative evaluation within society. By association, individuals in close relationships with RSOs may experience what Goffman (1963) [Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Simon & Schuster Ltd.] termed ‘courtesy stigma’, through which they are also negative...
To what extent can, or should, discursive psychologists and microanalysts of online data ignore the social and technological context of the communication they are studying? In this chapter I discuss briefly the debate around context in conversation analysis before considering the role of archived material in both discussion forums and Twitter, as w...
In this chapter, we introduce the overall approach of the book, that is, using microanalytic methods for analysing digital interaction. We discuss how, and why, microanalysis is a relevant approach for analysing digital interaction. We present an overview of three different microanalytic methods which are used by authors in subsequent chapters: con...
This book investigates interaction-focused scholarship on online communication. It focuses on a broad range of online contexts including social media, dating apps, online comments, instant messaging and video-mediated interaction. Bringing together experts from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, chapters demonstrate how different microanalytic met...
What is persona? Is there a single definition that all Persona scholars agree on? Are Persona scholars all using it in the same way? These are questions that I set out to answer in this paper, exploring both the contemporary persona studies literature and the Jungian concept of persona that is frequently cited as the intellectual root of the discip...
The affective and emotional engagement that audiences have with media figures has been studied in media psychology under the broad category of parasocial interaction. First coined by Horton and Wohl, parasocial interaction is usually interpreted as a sense of intimacy engendered through media use with one or more figures who would otherwise remain...
The concept of status is in the background of much research on celebrity but rarely made explicit, so in this collection of articles we seek to intervene by drawing attention to the usefulness of the concept in understanding the attribution of value in celebrity culture. We consider that celebrity status derives from an accumulation of social estee...
This study explores the changing relationship in the digital era between celebrities and fans by examining a group of emerging celebrities and their followers on Twitter. Seven crime authors were chosen as a case sample, each of which published their first work after 2010 and might therefore be regarded as ‘social media natives’. The authors’ follo...
In 2001, glossy lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan unveiled ‘the world’s most dangerous secret society’.1 This wasn’t the paramilitary wing of a terrorist organisation, or a Nazi paedophile network, but a motley band of interlinked websites promoting something described by the magazine as ‘pro-ana’: a romanticised, fetishised take on eating disorders...
How does a ‘behaviour’ become a ‘symptom’? A symptom is only meaningful in its context, as a kind of puzzle for an officially recognised expert to solve. While physical symptoms — rashes, sore throats, runny noses — are relatively easy for a medical practitioner to piece together to form a coherent, familiar picture, behavioural symptoms pose a muc...
This paper discusses the phenomenon of celebrity migration, whereby figures established in one cultural field attempt to cross over into a neighbouring field, a long-standing practice in the arts more generally, but one which is fraught with risk for the individual. I illustrate this with a case study of the popular musician Paul McCartney, who has...
Academic study of celebrity has hitherto been mostly based on the assumption that celebrities are human, and even semiotic theories of celebrity have been built around the notion that a ‘real person’ exists at its centre. In this paper I problematise this notion by discussing the case of animal celebrities, who lack many of the characteristics asso...
One of their functions of online mental health communities is the construction of coherent identities fortheirmembersbasedonthevariouscharacteristicsofdifferentmentalhealthconditions.Thispaper contains microanalyses of 2 message threads on mental health discussion forums—one concerning depression and the other ‘emetophobia’ (fear of being sick)—whi...
This article considers the fate of Asperger's disorder in the light of proposals for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) to collapse Asperger's disorder along with other pervasive developmental disorders into a general spectrum of autism. It is argued that a powerful lay and scientific culture has evolved around the...
This article discusses the fractious relationship between the British recording artist Morrissey and his online fan community. Following increasing criticism of the artist and his material during 2011, and growing impatience with his controversial public pronouncements, Morrissey has publicly disowned his biggest and longest-running fan site and ba...
This article consists of a qualitative analysis of discussion forums in online mental health communities whose members routinely write about diagnosis. The analysis concerns the function of diagnosis from the perspective of personal identity, with particular focus on the status of official diagnosis, as well as community members’ discussions of sym...
This study analysed news media content to examine the role played by celebrity drug use in young people's perceptions of drug use. We know that young people have access to discourses of drug use through music and other media which may emphasise short term gains (of pleasure or sexual success) over longer term health and social problems. This study...
Representations of voluntary childlessness--the declaration by an individual that he or she does not wish to bear or raise children--were studied in 116 articles published in British national newspapers in the period 1990-2008. Media framing analysis was used to examine broad patterns of framing of the topic, identifying four frames: voluntary chil...
The experience of being famous was investigated through interviews with 15 well-known American celebrities. The interviews detail the existential parameters of being famous in contemporary culture. Research participants were celebrities in various societal categories: government, law, business, publishing, sports, music, film, television news and e...
How precisely do media influence their readers, listeners and viewers? In this paper, we argue that any serious study of the psychology of media influence must incorporate a systematic analysis of media material. However, psychology presently lacks a methodology for doing this that is sensitive to context, relying on generalised methods like conten...
Social identity theory proposes that a threatened social identity can impact on self-concept and well-being. As a low-status minority group, mental health service users face the possibility of a threatened social identity compounding existing mental health problems. This may be further complicated by an inpatient admission where the context in whic...
Changing gender roles and increased sexual and economic freedom have created opportunities for women to give birth relatively late in life. However, stigma and misplaced fears about physical capacity are often reported as sources of anxiety among older, and in vitro fertilisation-induced mothers. In this study, we apply a specially adapted method f...
This paper presents a theoretical model derived from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 19 men who had had a vasectomy three years previously. The aim was to track men's experience of vasectomy through decision making, surgery and adjustment and to develop a model to shed light on the process. Early studies of vasectomy had suggested tha...
This chapter explores the measurement and profiling of celebrity worship, including a celebrity attitude scale, public figure preoccupation index, understanding the psychological construct of celebrity worship (consequences of celebrity worship, personality, cognitive variables, social and developmental aspects), and research in profiling.
This title is a comprehensive survey of the current knowledge about stalking, violence risk, and threat management towards public figures. With contributions from forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, clinicians, researchers, attorneys, profilers, and current and former law enforcement professionals. The book is divided into three sections whic...
The aim of the present studies was to generate implicit theories of a desire for fame among the general population. In Study 1, we were able to develop a nine-factor analytic model of conceptions of the desire to be famous that initially comprised nine separate factors; ambition, meaning derived through comparison with others, psychologically vulne...
Existing research argues that the muscular male body ideal, often promoted in the media, is associated with male body dissatisfaction and increasingly problematic attempts to attain unrealistic body shape by young males. The present study sought to examine the influence of ''lad magazines", a highly popular media sector over the last decade, and al...
Hope is important in determining positive outcomes in a range of chronic illnesses. This study examined the role of hope in adjustment to end-stage renal failure (ESRF) and consequent dialysis.
A cross-sectional design examined the ability of hope to predict adjustment to ESRF over and above other relevant variables.
Individuals receiving dialysis...
This study explored the personal psychological meanings ascribed to collections of recorded music in a small sample of 20 British consumers. In-depth interviews were conducted with the collectors and the data analysed according to the conventions of grounded theory. Three aspects of record collecting were identified as psychologically important: tw...
This qualitative study aimed to explore mothers' experiences of the support they received from community health professionals. Every third mother was selected from an NHS Trust's database of women whose health visitors had used the Solihull Approach. Forty-two women were sent information packs and consent forms. Nine mothers who returned consent fo...
A covert participant observation was conducted into the meanings of interaction in the "pro-ana" online community. Specifically, the researchers were interested in the kind of psychological support offered by such websites and by the beliefs of community members towards eating disorders and the processes of treatment and recovery. One of the author...
Quantitative research has identified many common features of anaesthetic awareness, including anxiety and auditory perceptions. However, there is a poverty of literature using qualitative techniques to investigate this experience. The present study aimed to address this. Two women who had regained consciousness during surgery were interviewed about...
This paper consists of a discourse analysis of data collected from websites that have been created by and for people who wish to share experiences of eating disorders in a positive and supportive environment. These sites have earned the broad description 'pro-ana' (where 'ana' is short for 'anorexia'). Site users have come to see themselves as a br...
Poster presentation
The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between celebrity worship and body image within the theoretical perspective of intense para-social relationships with celebrities.
Correlation and multiple regression analyses were used to examine the relationships between celebrity worship and body image.
Three samples, 229 (102 males an...
The influence of figures from the mass media on adolescent development has been somewhat neglected in the literature to date. One particularly important influence concerns the parasocial relationships that adolescents form with favourite celebrities, which have been described as secondary attachments. In this study, celebrity interest was investiga...
A comprehensive review of the literature relating to the impact of studying sexuality and sexual issues on the researcher is presented here. Consequences for the researcher, both personally and professionally are outlined incorporating ethical implications. Strategies identified as alleviating negative impact are also discussed.
Media representations of health and illness have come under scrutiny for their ability to mislead and misinform the public about health issues. However, the media also provide a public forum in which talk about health and illness may be circulated in a more positive fashion. This article consists of a narrative analysis of an episode of the BBC tal...
Media Psychology examines the impact that 21st century media use has on human behavior, from teenage crushes on pop stars to soap fandom in adulthood. It brings together North American communication research with European media research in a variety of disciplines--psychology, sociology, communication and media studies--and in doing so, maps out th...
The participation of members of the public in the mass media has been studied discursively at the level of live broadcasting, notably in talk radio and talk shows on television. In this article I examine the construction of public identities in `lifestyle' television programming, specifically property shows, in which members of the public appear ei...
This paper considers the phenomenon of parasocial interaction (PSI) used by media researchers to describe the relationship between media users and media figures (from celebrities to fictional characters). Although the concept has been used consistently across the past two decades in media research, it is argued here that it has not been sufficientl...
Eyewitness evidence and the confidence the eyewitness expresses in such evidence are crucial in many criminal trials. The present study is an examination of the influence of confusing questions often used by attorneys to examine witnesses in court. Participants viewed a videotaped incident and were questioned about the incident 1 week later. Half t...
The aim of the present study was to compare a number of different psychological predictors of shoplifting using measures of depression, self-esteem, stress, coping, personality and attitudes toward shoplifting. 132 undergraduate students (84 males, 48 females) completed measures of depressive symptoms, self-esteem, personality, coping style, stress...
What drives people to crave fame and celebrity? How does fame affect people psychologically? These issues are frequently discussed by the media but up till now psychologists have shied away from an academic away from an academic investigation of the phenomenon of fame. In this lively, eclectic book David Giles examines fame and celebrity from a var...
This article examines the retrospective accounts of drunken behaviour by groups of students who drink together regularly. The literature on `collective remembering' has demonstrated how shared memories are constructed discursively, and this is likely to be even more true of memories for events when participants were drunk. Close reading of the extr...
Although good visual memory is frequently cited as an essential requirement for competent spelling, there is little empirical evidence to support this. In this paper visual sequential memory was studied in two separate controlled experiments which compared the test performances of 13‐year‐old poor spellers and controls. Test materials were carefull...