Qualitative and Quantitative Investigations of Office Fans’ Connections With Fictional and Celebrity Couples: Identification, Parasocial Relationships, and Beyond

Though fans commonly viewand followfictional and celebrity couples, there is a dearth of research on audience involvement with media couples. Using a mixed-methods approach, we examined fan experiences with a fictional couple and actors’ real-life relationships vis-à-vis identification (psychological merging with media personae) and parasocial relationships (PSRs; one-sided relationships between fans and media personae). We recruited fans of The Office (US), emphasizing a central fictional couple, Jim and Pam, and the celebrity relationships of actors John Krasinski (Jim) and Jenna Fischer (Pam). In Study 1,we conducted semistructured qualitative interviews. Thematic analysis revealed that fans do not naturally differentiate between perspectives such as identification and PSRs. Fans struggle to separate the character from the actor in ways that color how they see the actor’s spouse; some think that other fans struggle with this more than they do, the latter being a third-person effect. In survey Studies 2 and 3,we demonstrated that fans identifywith and form PSRs with a couple as a unit. Both greater couple identification and couple PSRs predicted greater parasocial relationship investment in Jim/ Pam. Greater couple PSRs with Jim/Pam, but not greater couple identification, predicted greater discomfort with the celebrity relationship of John Krasinski and his wife, actor Emily Blunt. Furthermore, Studies 2 and 3 provide quantitative evidence for a unique instantiation of the third-person effect related to real and fictional couples.