Parents, Personality and Media Preferences

Abstract

In this article, we elaborate on how media preferences are related to personality traits and parental socialization practices. Employing representative data for the Netherlands in 1998 (N=1.714), we first find that of the psychological traits, openness to experience is a substantial predictor of the interest in serious content within the media; open personalities favor complex content, on television and in books. Furthermore, popular reading is fancied relatively often by conscientious people, whereas emotionally instable and friendly personalities seem to prefer popular programs on television significantly more. Second, our results underscore the importance of measuring parental media socialization practices. Using retrospective information on the situation in the parental home during a person's upbringing, we find that imitation of preferences occurs for all media consumption activities. For instance, if parents liked popular television programs, this results in a corresponding preference of their children for popular programs, controlled for relevant other predictors. The same goes for popular and serious reading, and for serious television watching. So, the idea of a modeling of media preferences by parents finds support. Third, our analyses clearly show that an investigation of media audiences must differentiate between contents. In predicting media preferences we noticed that content similarities are more evident than medium similarities.