Compare methods

	Uses and Gratifications Survey	Media Richness Analysis
Field	Communication	Communication
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1973	1986
Originator	Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler & Michael Gurevitch	Richard L. Daft & Robert H. Lengel
Type	Audience-centered survey approach to media motivations and rewards	Framework and method for assessing channel richness vs. task equivocality
Seminal source	Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509–523.	Daft, R. L., & Lengel, R. H. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Management Science, 32(5), 554–571.
Aliases	U&G survey, Gratifications sought and obtained survey, Media gratifications measurement, Kullanımlar ve Doyumlar Anketi	Media richness theory analysis, Information richness analysis, Channel richness assessment, Ortam Zenginliği Analizi
Related	4	3
Summary	The uses and gratifications survey is the dominant audience-centered method in communication research, asking not what media do to people but what people do with media. Codified by Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch in 1973, it treats audiences as active agents who select media to satisfy social and psychological needs, and it measures those motives and the rewards obtained through structured self-report scales.	Media richness analysis applies Daft and Lengel's media richness theory to evaluate communication channels by their capacity to carry rich information and to assess how well a channel fits the equivocality of the task at hand. Rooted in organizational communication, it provides criteria — feedback immediacy, multiplicity of cues, language variety, and personal focus — for ranking channels from lean (a memo) to rich (face-to-face) and for diagnosing whether managers and teams are matching channel to message appropriately.