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The activity of watching television has evolved drastically over the past decade as watching television has become an utmost activity in people's life which demands time and commitment and in turn provides entertainment, pleasure and storytelling. The unregulated consumption of television has drawn attention towards a new form of addiction that is binge watching (Camart et al., 2018). The activity of binge-watching is a highly immersive behaviour that gives rapid satisfaction which may lead to a lack of self-control as the individual spends more time binge-watching episodes of their favourite show than they intended (Starosta and Izydorczyk, 2020). This study assessed this novel behavioural addiction of binge-watching concerning compensatory health beliefs and academic procrastination among university students.
Binge-watching is the phenomenon of watching more than two episodes of the same television series in a row and one sitting for an extended period (Camart et al., 2018). Due to advancements in technologies, preferences to watch a show or series depend upon mood modification involving escapism from negative mood (Govaert and Rangarajan, 2014) and gratification of viewers involving interpersonal factors such as a content choice like action or comedy (Moore, 2015). The recent advances in the learning theory (Bandura, 1997) suggested that binge-watching facilitates socialization role due to prolonged watching in one sitting, additionally, it inhibits work by spending much time watching television content (Walton-Pattison et al., 2016). Further, Oliver (1977, as cited in Merikivi et al., 2016)) stated in expectation confirmation theory that behaviour is motivated by the anticipation of positive outcomes related to that behaviour hence binge watching results due to favourable outcomes like entertainment.
McQuail (2010) contended that for binge-watchers, watching multiple episodes is associated with satisfaction, need gratification, acquisition of knowledge, entertainment, escape, social interaction and identification with characters. However, over-gratifying and binging over media can lead to risky behaviour and within the range of risk perception lays the risk compensation. Therefore, binge-watchers develop compensatory health beliefs to counterbalance the negative outcomes of over-gratifying needs with alternative positive beliefs such as they are benefiting from watching television (Oberschmidt, 2017). Castro et al. (2021) implied that the activity of binge-watching is usually performed at the end of the day to achieve favourable consequences such as relaxation, escape from reality and relief from boredom. Consequently,...