For my research on Broken Matt Hardy, one of the topics I will be talking about will be Celebrity Worship. For this, I will be using a article written by James Houran and others for the British Journal of Psychology. The article is called "Conceptualization and measurement of celebrity worship". The reason why i'm using this article is because the writers back up their work with other sources, and they add to the information that was already written about.
The main point of the article is to show how people react to celebrities in certain fields of media. They used the a scale that they named the Celebrity Worship Scale, or the CWS. The scale factored acting, music, sports, and other celebrities equally. Celebrity worship, they said has 3 different stages, stage 1. Reading and watching the celebrity. Stage 2. Talking about the celebrity on social media. 3. A mixture of empathy for the success and failures the celebrity goes through, compulsive behaviors over the celebrity, over-identification with the celebrity, and obsession. The authors created a model showing the absorption and addiction people feel when seeing or hearing about the celebrity. I feel this research is important because it shows how people react to the celebrities they hear about everyday, especially since some people go to extremes over the celebrities.
To gather their research, the authors used the Parasocial Interaction Scale which measures the how viewers developed relationships with newscasters. This is important because the scale showed that 61% of viewers watched the same news channels because it made them feel comfortable. They also used results from a celebrity appeal questionnaire that was based on attraction to the celebrity using sex appeal, role model, entertainer, and mystique as their 4 factors. They themselves gathered information using a Rasch scaling approach that focused on responses from 249 volunteers to see how that rate a celebrity. The scale factored out bias and errors of estimation.
In the end of the study, they found that music and sports celebrities were more popular then those then those in acting. They found that men tend to talk more about media celebrities then women, which was consistent with another study by Levin and Arluke in 1985. The reason they found for the idolization of a celebrity was that they felt a special connection to the celebrity. I was shocked to hear that men were more likely to talk about media celebrities, but I wasn't shocked that the reason people worship a celebrity was because they felt a connection to them. In professions such as wrestling for example, how over a character is, the better they tend to do in the business.
In the end, I feel that I can use the article in my essay. When working with someone like Broken Matt Hardy, their research about how celebrities are seen by their viewers because of a "special connection" defiantly are seen with Matt. To see this, all you have to do is watch Monday Night Raw when Matt Hardy is on stage. Another thing this helps with is that most of the people who talk about him are wrestling fans, and most fans are men. The research they provided will help me fully analyze how and why fans respond to the "Broken Brilliance" of Broken Matt Hardy
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