Article: Celebrity Worship: Critiquing a Construct

by Gayle S. Stever, June 2011

McCutcheon, Lange, & Houran (2002) proposed the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to identify celebrity worshipers, useful for identifying individuals who are overly absorbed or addicted to their interest in a celebrity. Problematic is the absence of a conceptual definition for celebrity worshiper and how this term relates to use of the term fan. Currently, these terms are most often used as if they were synonyms (Haspel, 2006; Maltby, Day, McCutcheon, Gillett et al., 2004; McCutcheon, Lange, & Houran, 2002). Sampled groups of serious fans contained many individuals who met none of the criteria for celebrity worship, as identified by the CAS. The use of celebrity worshiper as a synonym for fan appears to be conceptually flawed.