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Article published In:
Scientific Study of Literature
Vol. 7:1 (2017) ► pp.109–128

Mediated relationships with TV characters

The effects of perceived and actual similarity in personality traits

| University of Haifa
| University of Haifa

Five TV actors completed the Big Five personality scale for a character they played on a popular Israeli TV comedy. Viewers of each of these series completed the same scales both for themselves and as they thought the characters would have completed them. They then completed parasocial relationship and identification scales with respect to the same character. Perceived and measured similarity scores (i.e., using the actors’ scores) were computed for each viewer-character pair. These similarity scores were then used to predict both parasocial relationship strength and the degree of identification. Results show that perceived and measured similarity are mostly unrelated and that perceived similarity, but not measured similarity, is related to parasocial relationships and identification. Implications of these results for mediated relationships theory and measurement validity are discussed.

Keywords: identification, parasocial relationships, mediated relationships, perceived similarity, media characters, character-audience similarity
Article outline
  • Similarity, identification, and parasocial relationships
    • Parasocial relationships
      • Identification
  • Similarity and perceived similarity
  • External and internal similarity
  • Hypotheses
  • Method
    • Overview
    • Sample
    • The characters
    • Measures
      • The Five Factor Model (FFM)
  • Results
    • Preliminary analysis
    • Hypotheses testing
  • Discussion
    • Perceived similarity is not a proxy for similarity
  • Differences between parasocial relationships and identification
    • Limitations and future direction
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.7.1.05coh
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