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Product Description academic From the Publisher Abstract: This research study explores White and African American television viewers' parasocial interaction relationships with White and African American situation comedy characters. Parasocial interaction was first introduced by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl (1956) and became known as a one-sided friendship television viewers have with a mass media character. Even though the one-way friendships are based on vicarious interaction via television rather than actual social interaction, viewers feel they really know the media character. Using a total sample of 332 White and African American participants from the University of Kentucky (Lexington) and Tougaloo College in (Jackson) Mississippi, the study sought to determine whether the participants would engage in stronger parasocial interaction relationships with same-race characters. All of the participants were exposed to an edited version of a prime-time situation comedy that contained White and African American characters and asked to complete a post-viewing survey. The survey contains scales measuring respondents' parasocial interaction, involvement and identification with the television characters (Audience-Persona Interaction (API) Scale), in addition to perceived realism and affinity for television dimensions. General television viewing items and demographic questions are also included. Factorial analysis of variance with repeated measures, Pearson's correlation, and multiple regression were used to analyze the data.