An examination of the relationship of United States television and Canadian identity

This article is intended to add to the literature on the relationship of imported media to a country's national identity. It focuses on the effects of American television on Canadian national identity. Utilizing metric multidimensional scaling, substantial differences were found in the relation between the self and the concepts “Canada” and the “United States” when a Canadian sample was broken down by frequency of viewing American television. The more U.S. television viewed by Canadians, the less they perceived of themselves as Canadian and the more they perceived of themselves as Americans. In the portion of the sample that watched an extreme amount of American television, the subjects identified significantly closer to the United States than to Canada. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the Canadian context.