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The instrumental use of media entertainment in coping strategies: understanding media entertainment selection during the COVID-19 lockdown
Abstract
In the face of the 2020 global pandemic caused by COVID-19, governments have taken several measures to stop COVID-19’s spread. These measures include teleworking, cancelling major events, and limited or no access to restaurants, bars, movie theatres, and so forth. Along with COVID-19-related health concerns, these measures led to increased stress levels, but also to an increased use of media entertainment. This increased use might be related to the instrumental use of media entertainment as a coping mechanism for this stressful and emotionally challenging situation. The present study takes a closer look at how individuals select media entertainment – specifically TV series – during the potentially stressful COVID-19 lockdown situation, by integrating the perspectives of stress and coping, mood management, and hedonic and eudaimonic media entertainment. An online vignette survey among 336 individuals was conducted. Results based on four three-way mixed ANOVA’s suggest that people select entertainment media based on their existing hedonic and eudaimonic preferences, but also in function of their coping strategies. People who use humor as a coping mechanism prefer television programmes that address the current crisis in a less meaningful, but funny way. Those who use religion as a coping mechanism actually prefer meaningful and moving content but are less likely to select television programmes about the current crisis. This study includes important insights in the instrumental use of entertainment media during challenging times, and illustrates how both humor and religion are coping mechanisms that are highly personal and context-related.
... To stop COVID-19's spread, several measures were such as working from home, cancellation of major events, limited or no access to restaurants, bars, movie theatres and so forth were made to follow. Subsequently along with COVID-19-related health concerns, these measures led to increased stress and anxiety levels (De Ridder et al., 2021). Especially for adolescents, who highly rely on social contacts with peers, the prolonged period of social isolation had detrimental effects on their mental health (Yang et al., 2020). ...
... To stop COVID-19's spread, several measures were such as working from home, cancellation of major events, limited or no access to restaurants, bars, movie theatres and so forth were made to follow. Subsequently along with COVID-19-related health concerns, these measures led to increased stress and anxiety levels (De Ridder et al., 2021). Especially for adolescents, who highly rely on social contacts with peers, the prolonged period of social isolation had detrimental effects on their mental health (Yang et al., 2020). ...
The present era of rapid technological changes and the rising rate of internet penetration has created a stride for an individual’s entertainment preferences. The rise of Over-the-Top (OTT) media services has made strides by altering the media space during the pandemic caused by COVID. Smart phones and access to broad band made OTT acceptable by a large part of the population worldwide. The handheld device OTT is becoming the preferred mode of content consumption by the viewers in India as well. However, there are certain shortcomings of this emerging mode of media mostly in terms of socio-economic as well as technological issues. In addition to finding the growing demands of OTT, present study emphasized on the challenges posed for the adoption of this rapidly preferred media platform. On the analysis of the data collected from the respondents in the twin city of Odisha (Cuttack and Bhubaneswar), the findings revealed three prime factors such as ‘user behaviour’, ‘technological flexibility’ and ‘customer-centric content’ to be the significant influencers of OTT content. The insights of this study can help the regulatory authorities as well as OTT media players in promotion and strategy formulation.
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