...populations not exist. her book, Desperately Seeking the Audience, she proposed that despite the need for the television industry to manufacture, package, and deliver audiences to advertisers, the reality is much more ephemeral. Audiences are hard to define and hard to keep as a coherent, consistent set of viewers.

Despite Ang's arguments, producers of American television continue to sell audiences to advertisers, relying on analyses of niche markets rather than the audience as a whole (Turow, 1997). One such audience that has received recent industry interest is "the older viewer." For example, various industry analysts have focused on the success of CBS in attracting the lucrative older adult market (Ahrens, 2004; de Moraes, 2003; Lindorff, 1999, 2000). Is there an entity that can meaningfully be labeled "the older audience," and if so, how should it best be described?

It has consistently been reported that older adults watch more television than any other age group, including children (see Robinson, Skill, & Turner, 2004, for a summary). Based on this, a number of writers (e.g., Davis & Davis, 1985) have gone further to suggest that older adults are a particularly vulnerable audience and, in the absence of other sources of information and in the presence of negative television stereotypes of old age, develop low self-esteem and television-biased versions of reality.

Are There Really Age Differences?

This summary of old age not only assumes homogeneity among older viewers but also confuses two overlapping entities: older viewers and older cohorts. Age differences in amount and type of viewing generally have been established using cross-sectional data such as those supplied by the Nielsen or Simmons market research companies or by academics' surveys (e.g., Davis & Kubey, 1982). Most mass media researchers give maturational explanations for these cross-sectional differences: Age differences in viewing are assumed to reflect the life events of individuals such as getting a job, getting married, having children, retiring, and being widowed. Older viewers watch more because of the life events associated with being older.

An alternative is that particular generations (called cohorts) adopt specific patterns of media use and remain faithful to those patterns across the life span. Maybe older viewers now watch differently compared to younger viewers, but they do so because they have always been different, not because they are older. Is it helpful to define audiences by age or by birth date (not the same thing), or some combination of the two?

The issue is further complicated by the possibility that audiences come together at particular times. The Olympic games, the general elections, or the death of a princess are watched by many rather than few. When everyone watches television, differences between audiences, whether defined by age, cohort, or something else, are smaller than at less remarkable moments.

Other authors have raised these issues before, and two prior studies have tried to untangle the joint effects of age, cohort, and time of measurement on television viewing. However, the prior results are somewhat contradictory, and in both cases limitations of the data sets leave the door open for further investigation.

First, Danowski and Ruchinskas (1983) raised the possibility that current older adults have always watched substantial amounts of television, because television emerged as a new technology during their young adulthood (i.e., in the 1950s). Their view was that each generation tends to "embrace" the technologies that are introduced during their early and middle adulthood (a period they described as combining mental flexibility and purchasing power). Because those former young adults are now older adults, cross-sectional surveys find age differences that are spuriously attributed to maturation. Unfortunately, Danowski and Ruchinskas tested their hypothesis using data from the National Election Survey, which only asked about exposure to televised presidential campaign information. They found strong cohort and time of measurement effects and weak age effects just as they had predicted. They suggested that the same results would be found for measures of daily viewing, but they could not test this claim.

Second, Peiser (2000) used data from the Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, which conducted cross-sectional surveys in 1960, 1970, and 1980. He reported that there was evidence for all three types of effects (age, time of measurement, and cohort). Across all cohorts, television viewing increased as adults reached their 50s and declined slightly once they reached their 60s. There were also cohort effects such that later cohorts tended to watch more than earlier cohorts. Finally, Peiser found particularly strong effects of time of measurement, with a substantial leap in television viewing from 1960 to the second time of measurement in 1970. The chief flaw of this data set is that television viewing was only assessed for prime-time week evenings and weekend hours, making it problematic to look for age differences. After all, one of the major reasons for expecting age differences is the likelihood that older retired adults may watch during hours when other people are working.

To investigate these issues we needed a series of cross-sectional surveys in which questions about television use were asked at different points in time, allowing us to study each birth cohort at variety of life stages. The General Social Survey (GSS) provides a series of cross-sectional surveys conducted virtually every year since 1972. Television viewing has been measured sporadically since 1975 with the question, "On the average day, about how many hours do you personally watch television?" (1)

The two main accounts of older audiences can be formally summarized as two hypotheses, the first dealing with maturation and the second dealing with the effects of birth cohort.

[H.sub.1]: There will be a significant (even if nonlinear) relationship between age and amount of daily television viewing, such that older adults watch more television than younger adults. This relationship will remain significant even after controls for cohort and period.

[H.sub.2]: There will be a significant (even if nonlinear) relationship between cohort and amount of daily television viewing, such that cohorts who were young adults in the 1940s and 1950s will watch more than subsequent cohorts. Controlling for cohort will remove the effect of age on television viewing.

Unfortunately, the possibility of period effects (as previously described) could not be examined adequately. GSS data are collected only once a year (television viewing data often collected only biannually). Therefore, the types of events that occurred during a particular year that cut across cohort or age to bring viewers together could not be identified and specific hypotheses about period could not be made. Period effects were included in the analyses to be consistent with prior research and to allow for post hoc surprises.

Why Would There Be Age Differences?

Even if there were some evidence that maturation was at work and that older audiences, regardless of birth cohort, behaved differently compared to younger audiences, the important question would be to try to figure out why. Of itself, chronological age is not a particularly interesting variable. One way of thinking about it is to suggest that age picks out a host of characteristics such as work status, health, and physical mobility and that age differences in viewing reflect these variables (Robinson et al., 2004; Young, 1979).

In the simplest model, Robinson et al. (2004) suggested that older adults watch more television because they have the time and opportunity. That is, most people watch as much as they are able, and older adults are able to watch more because they are more likely to be retired (see also Comstock & Paik, 1991).

There are alternative accounts that are much grimmer. For example, the American Psychological Association's (APA) review of the literature on television and society (Huston et al., 1992) listed the following reasons for age-related increases in viewing: The elderly are a "disadvantaged" people who share with other disadvantaged...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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