The Uses and Gratifications of Magazine Readership Among Women in Nairobi.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to establish the uses and gratification of maga- zine readership among women in Nairobi with the express purpose of giving recommendations to magazine publishers and editors regarding how they could match their contents to requirements of women readers. Further, the study also sought to give a profile of the woman magazine readers in Nairobi. A survey was done in 1998 of 186 respondents to determine women's reading habits and the gratifications they obtained from reading magazines. The researcher with the help of two assistants distributed self-administered questionnaires to the sample. The findings indicated that women read all types of magazines; they also pre- ferred to buy their own copies. Fifteen magazines were identified as those read regularly. They ranged from social magazines that were most popular to news magazines. Women magazine readers turned out to be young, well educated, mostly single with relatively well paying jobs and could therefore afford their own copies. Women readers also preferred content including relationships and marriage pri- marily as well as professional advancement and religious matters. When factor analysis, a statistical procedure that is used to identify common traits was applied to the data, eight gratifications for magazine reading were iden- tified. These were social identification, interpersonal interaction, seeking informa- tion for self-improvement, self- understanding, spiritual inspiration, entertain- ment and relaxation, escape from reality and time filler gratifications. Though these gratifications confirmed findings of other studies on media use, the impor- tance attached to them differed. For example, social identification, or the need to feel attached to others came out as the strongest gratification obtained from maga- zine reading, a category that does not have very strong showing in the literature. This seemed to indicate African audiences might obtain somewhat differing gratifications for magazine use as compared to western ones.