The relationships among Chinese audience's personal characteristics, motives for viewing Korean TV series, and their addiction behaviors to Korean TV series.

Abstract

This survey research aims to investigate the relationship between Chinese audience’s personal characteristics and their motives for viewing Korean TV series, and to examine the relationship between their motives for viewing Korean TV series and their addiction behaviors to Korean TV series. Two hundred and fourteen Chinese audiences who selected using convenience sampling have participated in this survey research. The means, standard deviation were being tabulated and analyzed by One-Way ANOVA and Multiple Regression with the significance level of 0.05. The findings revealed the following results: 1. Chinese audience who have different gender, age, and time spent in watching the series had significantly different television viewing motives in respect to relaxation, companionship, habit, pass time, entertainment, social interaction, information, arousal, and escape for Korean television series. Chinese audience who differed in gender have social interaction. Male audience had higher social interaction than female respondents. The samples who differed in age had significant different habit, information, and escape. Finally, those who had different time spent in viewing Korean TV series had significant different relaxation, companionship, habit, pass time, entertainment, information, arousal, and escape, respectively. 2. Chinese audience‘s different television viewing motives in respect to relaxation, companionship, habit, pass time, entertainment, social interaction, information, arousal, and escape, for Korean television series were significant predictors of their television addiction behavior in respect to tolerance, withdrawal, unintended use, cutting down, time spent, displacement of other activities, and Continued use. The findings suggested that television viewing motives are accountable for 65.4% of their addiction behavior to Korean TV series. Most, importantly, Chinese viewers’ motives for relaxation, companionship, habit, information, arousal, and escape were positive predictors of their addiction behavior. However, motives for pass time, entertainment, and social interaction were negative predictors of their addiction behavior. The study suggested that Chinese viewers watched Korean TV series because they wanted to escape from reality, to seek information, and to stick to their habits, ranking as the top 3 motives for viewing Korean TV series. While other motives were not significant predictors of their addiction behavior.