Gayle Stever, Ph. D.

by Gayle S. Stever, January 2017

Media has had an enormous impact on how gender and gender roles are perceived culturally. Media is generally understood to be a form of communication that is less direct than face-to-face communication, including a number of different media forms that influence and have been influenced by gender roles. These include, but are not limited to, television, advertising, animated media forms, video games, and books.

by Gayle S. Stever, November 2016

In a participant-observer ethnographic study, the researcher offers evidence from 10 years of observation of the Josh Groban fandom as an example of fans becoming friendly acquaintances of celebrities. Contrary to the way much of the psychological literature depicts fans as celebrity worshippers or stalkers, the largest percentage of the fans observed in this study showed normal social engagement with others outside of their fan activity, and a friendly acquaintanceship with Groban that is similar to other kinds of relationships happening outside of the context of mediated relationships. Fans who pursued these relationships did so within a social context and network of other fans in most cases...

by Gayle S. Stever, March 2016

Article: Forming attachments to those people proximal to the individual was the only option prior to mass media. In an era of mass media, individuals become acquainted with media personae, expanding greatly the pool of available attachment objects. This increases the possibility of a parasocial attachment, defined as a nonreciprocated attachment to a familiar other, and from whom one derives safe haven and felt security...

by Gayle S. Stever, April 2015

Popular Music Fandom and the Public Sphere

by Gayle S. Stever, September 2013

International Communication Association, Transforming Audiences Conference

by Gayle S. Stever, September 2013

Transforming Audiences

This article addresses the presence of social media in our culture and the significance of interaction that takes place through social media. Specifically this research calls for a description of social interaction between/among a sample of celebrities and their fans on Twitter. It is a given that fans normally don’t have access to regular social interaction with their favorite celebrities...

by Gayle S. Stever and Kevin Lawson, January 2013

Twitter is a relatively new social media website and a good option for celebrities who want to chat with their fans without having to give away personal access information. This paper presents an analysis of a sample of the Twitter accounts of 12 entertainment media celebrities, 6 males and 6 females, all taken from 2009-2012 Twitter feeds. Since little is known about Twitter, a grounded theory approach for this study was used. Twitter can be used to learn about parasocial interaction, the unreciprocated interaction between individuals of differing status and knowledge of one another. This analysis provides a first step in that endeavor...

by Gayle S. Stever, January 2013

This article delineates the distinctions between mediated and parasocial relationships before outlining the key aspects of parasocial theory and suggesting that the theory be expanded to consistently include parasocial attachment as a category distinct from parasocial relationships. Parasocial theory involves interactions, relationships and attachments between people of differing status such that one person is well known to the other but that knowing is not reciprocated. As media become more pervasive in the day-to-day lives of individuals, it becomes more and more important to understand the mechanisms whereby parasocial interaction, relationships, and attachments function in both development and social life...

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.

by Gayle S. Stever, March 2011

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The theories of Levinson (1986 Am Psychol 41(1):3–13) and Erikson (1959 Identity and the life cycle. WW Norton and Co, New York, 1968 Youth and crisis. WW Norton and Co, New York), Bandura’s (1986 Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs) Social Cognitive Theory, and the ethological attachment theories of Bowlby (1969 Attachment and loss, Vol. 1, attachment. Hogarth, London), and Ainsworth (1978 Patterns of attachment: a psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale) are used in a discussion of the para-social and social relationships that fans have with celebrities...