DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A MEDIA NOSTALGIA SCALE

116 Pages·2016·1.02 MB·English

The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
College of Communications

DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A MEDIA NOSTALGIA SCALE

A Dissertation in
Mass Communications

by
Mun-Young Chung
© 2016 Mun-Young Chung

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

May 2016
The dissertation of Mun-Young Chung was reviewed and approved by the following:

Mary Beth Oliver
Distinguished Professor of Communications
Dissertation Advisor
Co-Chair of Committee

Fuyuan Shen
Associate Professor of Communications
Co-Chair of Committee

Matthew P. McAllister
Professor of Communications

Edgar Yoder
Professor of Agricultural and Extension Education

Ford Risley
Professor of Communications
Associate Dean of the College of Communications

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School
iii
ABSTRACT
The present study distinguished the characteristics of nostalgia triggered by consuming
media content. Conducting three separate sequential studies involving people’s exposure and
reaction to nostalgic media content, this dissertation developed a media nostalgia scale that
included 18 items with four dimensions of nostalgia related to media content: Perceived
Nostalgia, Sharing, Recalling Related Others, and Intention for Further Consumption. After
consuming nostalgic media content, individuals exhibited three emotional affects: Unpleasant
Affect, Positive Affect, and Bittersweet Affect. The media nostalgia scale on each of the factors
was examined and validated by comparing two conditions: the nostalgic versus recent media
conditions. This study also found individuals’ positive responses to nostalgic media content on
perceived identification, hedonic and eudaimonic evaluation, meaningfulness in life, and
intention to share current emotion with others. The study concludes with discussion of its
limitations and future research using the media nostalgia scale.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................... v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... vi
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1
Literature Review ..................................................................................................................... 2
Nostalgia Infused with Personal and Historical Memories .............................................. 2
Media Content as a Trigger for Nostalgia ........................................................................ 5
Media Nostalgia with Emotions ....................................................................................... 8
Nostalgia and Identity ...................................................................................................... 10
Nostalgia and Social Sharing ........................................................................................... 12
Nostalgic Media Content for Meaningfulness ................................................................. 14
Overview .................................................................................................................................. 16
Study 1: General Media Nostalgia Items ................................................................................. 17
Method ...................................................................................................................... 17
Results ...................................................................................................................... 18
Discussion ................................................................................................................ 26
Study 2: Data Reduction for the Media Nostalgia Scale ......................................................... 28
Method ...................................................................................................................... 28
Results ...................................................................................................................... 31
Discussion ................................................................................................................ 40
Study 3: Validation of the Media Nostalgia Scale ................................................................... 42
Method ...................................................................................................................... 42
Results ...................................................................................................................... 48
Discussion ................................................................................................................ 62
General Discussion .................................................................................................................. 64
References ................................................................................................................................ 71
Appendix A: Questionnaire for Study 1 .................................................................................. 81
Appendix B: Questionnaire for Study 2 ................................................................................... 86
Appendix C: Questionnaire for Study 3 ................................................................................... 98
v
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Formats of Nostalgic Media Content ......................................................................... 18
Table 2. Genres of Nostalgic Media Content ........................................................................... 19
Table 3. Genres of Nostalgic Music ......................................................................................... 20
Table 4. Descriptive Statistics of Media Nostalgia Dimensions and Emotions ....................... 32
Table 5. Four Factors of Media Nostalgia Items ..................................................................... 33
Table 6. Correlation for Media Nostalgia Items ...................................................................... 34
Table 7. Emotional Affects for Media Nostalgia ..................................................................... 37
Table 8. Inter-Correlation for Emotions on Media Nostalgia .................................................. 38
Table 9. Zero-order Correlations for Media Nostalgia and Emotions ..................................... 39
Table 10. Descriptive Statistics of Affective Response, Emotion, and Evaluation ................. 47
Table 11. CFA for Four Factors of Media Nostalgia Items ..................................................... 50
Table 12. Bivariate Correlation for Media Nostalgia Items ..................................................... 52
Table 13. Correlations for Media Nostalgia Factors ................................................................ 54
Table 14. Comparison between the Four-Factor Model and the Single-Factor Model ........... 55
Table 15. Univariate Statistics of Media Nostalgia Measures ................................................. 56
Table 16. Univariate Statistics of Affective Reactions ............................................................ 57
Table 17. Response to Nostalgic Media ................................................................................... 59
Table 18. Association of Media Nostalgia with Audience Responses .................................... 61
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation marks only the beginning of my academic journey. As Isaac Newton
said, I feel as a boy who is playing with a small shovel of knowledge beside a great ocean of
truth. I resolve to make a constant effort through study.
Most of all, I appreciate the efforts of my beloved advisor and academic mom, Dr. Mary
Beth Oliver. She has taught me how to harmonize the areas of my life and to be an admired
teacher, happy researcher, and mature human being. I cannot express my full appreciation for
what she has given me!
From the start to the finish of this dissertation, I have received great advices from my
committee. Dr. Matthew P. McAllister shared his extensive knowledge regarding media and
culture that helped me develop my research idea. Dr. Fuyuan Shen became a role model for me
as an international scholar. Dr. Edger Yoder gave me insight into the dedicated life of an
educator in academia.
I appreciate the opportunity that I could learn research and teaching from Dr. Michael
Schmierbach, Dr. George Anghelcev, Dr. Colleen Connolly-Ahern, Dr. Shyam Sundar, Dr.
Denise Bortree, Dr. Mary Hardin, and many other great professors in the College of
Communications.
I enjoyed my doctoral program thanks to my great cohorts. I extend great thanks to Drs.
Sangyong Han, Justin Walden, Brian MacAuley, Yuki Dou, Lauren Jaclyn, Guan-Soon Khoo,
Jeeyun Oh, Erin Ash, Tony Limperos, Julia Woolley, Mu Wu, Steve Bien-Aime, Karina Kim,
Dunya Antunovic, and other friends for providing me warm memories on campus and within the
James Building.
My time living in the White Course global community with other graduate student
families was the most peaceful period in my life. I thank Woojin, Siyeon, Giju, and Kangin’s
family for becoming good neighbors to my family in the U.S.
I deeply appreciate my parents, Yangi Chung, Youngsu An, Mujin Kim, and Bokran Park,
for their support and encouragement.
Lastly, my endless love goes to my wife, Hyangsook and my daughter, Yisol.
1
Introduction
At the beginning of the movie Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane, a dying media mogul,
while looking at a snow globe of a small cottage, utters the name of his childhood sled—
Rosebud—a name that others do not recognize. For Kane, the memory of the sled, triggered by
the snow globe, was so important to him that it is literally the last word he says before he dies.
However, had Rosebud not been a personal object but a popular media program, people who had
consumed that media content during the same period would have understood and perhaps even
shared Kane’s nostalgia. In fact nostalgia is a large part of our media experience. From watching
reruns of long-cancelled television shows to listening an “oldie” song on the radio, we as media
audiences are often taken back by media to previous times in our lives that we may remember
with fondness.
To extend our understanding of the concept of nostalgia that is associated not only with
personal events but also with media content that has previously been consumed, we might ask
the following questions. What are the distinguishing characteristics of nostalgia related to media
content? What emotions are to be associated with the nostalgic feeling evoked by media content?
What are the possible effects of consuming nostalgic media content?
2
Literature Review
Nostalgia Infused with Personal and Historical Memories
Nostalgia refers to a yearning to return home. Nostalgic experiences can be found in
literature, such as Odysseus’s journey in Homer’s Odyssey, or in personal documents, such as the
letters of Swiss mercenaries who missed home while fighting on foreign battlefields (Sedikides,
Wildschut, Arndt, & Routledge, 2008). In the guise of homesickness, nostalgic feelings can be
linked to a longing for home; however, the home might no longer exist or might exist as an
individual fantasy. Thus, we can experience feelings of nostalgia not only from real memories,
but also when viewing created images like scenes from movies or television shows (Boym,
2001).
As a psychological symptom, nostalgia was previously treated as a negative concept as
well as a mental problem linked with homesickness (Werman, 1977) or mental suffering
(Castelnuovo-Tedesco, 1980) in studies of pathology. The root of nostalgia in
German, Heimweh, translates to homesickness, such that nostalgia was treated as a mental
disease (Starobinski & Kemp, 1966); in the Czech language, Litost means grief, remorse, and
undefined longing (Boym, 2001). Yet researchers also look at the positive dimensions of
nostalgia, which include enhancing individuals’ self-concept, such as identity, after experiencing
nostalgia (Davis, 1979) and a sense of connectedness with others (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt,
& Routledge, 2006). Furthermore, nostalgia is thought to affect individuals’ attitudes toward out-
group members. For example, after feeling nostalgia, individuals have more positive attitudes
toward out-group members (Turner, Wildschut, & Sedikides, 2012). Currently, scholars are
investigating whether individuals who feel nostalgia with others increase their psychological
3
well-being as community members (Batcho, 2007; Laukka, 2006; Wildschut, Sedikides, &
Cordaro, 2011).
In experiencing nostalgia, an individual tends to turn his/her mind to images of the past
that suggest a relatively better time (Davis, 1979). For many people, the past sounds like a more
ideal period—a time that raises feelings of longing and absence (Wildschut et al., 2006).
Depending on the time and environment, a group of people might experience similar feelings of
nostalgia toward a time and location and tend to idealize the nostalgic object. For example, some
Palestinian refugees might wish to return to their previous territory in part due to feelings of
nostalgia (Volkan, 1999). Overall, shared nostalgic feelings among group members are a
common phenomenon. Nostalgia is also described as a preference (e.g., general liking, positive
attitude, favorable affect) toward objects (e.g., people, places, things) that were more common
(e.g., popular, fashionable, widely circulated) when an individual was younger (in early
adulthood, in adolescence, in childhood, or even in an era before their birth) (Holbrook &
Schindler, 1991, p. 330).
As Turner (1987) pointed out, “for the nostalgic, the world is alien” (p. 149). Nostalgia
relates to continuity and the fear of discontinuity about past memory, home, family, important
others, or even the self. For some people, such discontinuity can threaten their ideal and utopian
images of the past; thus, feelings of discontinuity from past memories can be a source of terror
for them. Davis (1979) defined nostalgia as “the desire for continuity to individuals’ ideal past”
(p. 35). In this context, individuals possibly enrich and glorify their previous memories to
maintain ideal images of their past (Kaplan, 1987).
4
Forman (2012) defined nostalgia as delimiting “the emotional and psychological damage
inflicted by a society that invests value in modern phenomena and that increasingly secludes and
marginalizes its elders” (p. 256). Meanwhile, Boym (2001) defined nostalgia as “a historical
emotion” (p. 16) that is also related to a personal memory. Based on the definition of nostalgia,
Boym (2001) categorized nostalgia in two ways. First, restorative nostalgia is related to
originality; this form of nostalgia involves rebuilding the original memory. An example of
restorative nostalgia is nationalism, in which nostalgic feelings are connected to previous values
of a society related to nostalgic feelings, which could be the object to be restored as tradition.
Restorative nostalgia involves ethical homogeneity when making judgments (e.g., good and
evil). Those who experience restorative nostalgia are usually thinking about historical events or
periods, such as nostalgia for the glory days of communist countries such as East Germany
(Barney, 2009). In addition, reflective nostalgia relates more to personal and cultural memory
than to recovering origins or truth.
Nostalgic feelings can also stem from collective memories. Ultimately, multiple
narratives are possible through this assemblage of personal memories. Because reflective
nostalgia fits between personal and collective memory, individuals can experience some
emotions, such as mourning and melancholia, that relate to the loss of collective frameworks of
memory. In Boym’s (2001) example, a photo of Tito, a previous leader of Yugoslavia, could
evoke memories of the communist ideology from Tito’s era as well as personal childhood
memories from the era of Tito’s control.
Stern (1992) and Havlena and Holak (1991) divided nostalgia into personal and historical
aspects. Personal nostalgia stems from individuals’ direct experience of a previous time (e.g., I