Audience Reception - Audience Analysis

Audience Analysis

Audiences can be groups or individuals targeted by and often built by media industries. Audience can be active (constantly filtering or resisting content) or passive (complying and vulnerable).

Audience analysis emphasizes the diversity of responses to a given popular culture artifact by examining as directly as possible how given audiences actually understand and use popular culture texts. Three kinds of research make up most audience research: 1) broad surveys and opinion polls (like the famous Nielsen ratings, but also those done by advertisers and by academic researchers) that cover a representative sample of many consumers. 2) small, representative focus groups brought in to react to and discuss a pop culture text. 3) in-depth ethnographic participant observation of a given audience, in which, for example, a researcher actually lives with and observes the TV viewing habits of a household over a substantial period of time, or travels on the road with a rock band. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes more than one approach is used as a check on the others. Audience analysis tries to isolate variables like region, race, ethnicity, age, gender, and income in an effort to see how different social groups tend to construct different meanings for the same text.

In media studies, there are two models used to construct audience reception. These models are defined as (1) The effects model (Hypodermic Model) and (2) The uses and gratification model. The effects model focuses on what the media does to audiences, influences is based on the message conveyed within the media. The uses and gratification model emphasizes what the audience does with the media presented to them, here influence lies with the consumer.

The ‘ethnographic turn’ contributed to the maturing of the field as contexts of consumption are now recognized as having significant impact upon the processes of the interpretation of media. Sometimes characterized as the ‘active audience’ approach, this paradigm has attracted criticism for the apparent jettisoning of the influence of cultural power, diminishing the authority of the text while elevating the influence of context. Nevertheless developments in this vein have deepened our understanding of the significant relationship between media texts and the production of identity. Repeatedly, audience studies and fan studies have recorded the ways in which media texts are utilized and often re-made in the creative production and reproduction of self-identity.