Offers a new approach for the study of soap opera, aimed at discovering the social boundaries within which a particular culture negotiates its primordial relationships. Reveals the interaction between culture, power, genre, and gender by tracing the complex kinship structures of family and romance among soap opera characters and by observing how…

Hypothesizes that instrumental media motivation, selectivity, attention, and involvement are positive predictors of satisfaction, parasocial interaction, and cultivation effects from watching daytime television serials; avoidance, distraction, and skepticism were seen as negative predictors. Finds support for these expectations through three path…