The situation in media and communication research

Abstract Communication researchers have long sought to situate or contextualize media behaviors in their natural settings. However, the many approaches taken to understand media behavior in context have varied considerably. This article proposes a metatheoretical framework for theorizing media behavior at the situational level, encompassing the entirety of circumstances surrounding a media behavior at a given moment. The framework describes how psychological states, environmental context, and media context combine to shape moment-to-moment media behavior. We then describe how situational factors have the potential to interact with the three phases of media behavior—i.e., selection, processing, and disengagement—in distinctive ways. We argue that communication researchers only gain the ability to explain the variability in media behavior by taking the situational level into account. We conclude by providing future theoretical and empirical directions to guide the field in building a more generalizable and durable understanding of situated media behavior.