RESUMO
The study observed the communication behavior of Australian housewives, including both mass media and interpersonal communications, in order to test a priori hypotheses about four broad types of communication: viz., leaders, followers, exchangers, and isolates, in respect of seven household products. A sample of 125 housewife members of an Australian commercial consumer panel each returned a Time Diary for one, 24 hour period, which reported exhaustively on their involvement in interpersonal and mass communications. When the data were factor analyzed, factors for all predicted communicator-types were observed. In particular, the findings show that opinion exchange between housewives was the dominant communication pattern for such household products; opinion leaders or followers were shown, contrary to more traditional theories of personal influence and communication, to be much less frequent than opinion exchangers.