Audience Research

An audience is a group of people before whom a performance takes place. A common distinction is between the simple and direct audience experience of the theater or a live sporting event and that of being a member of the audience for a performance mediated through television, radio, or film. Understanding how audiences react to what they are watching or consuming is of interest to business and the commercial producers of media, as well as academics. Research into audiences has a long history and has broadly taken quantitative (e.g., surveys and statistical measures of how people consume) or qualitative (e.g., observation or small group discussions) forms.

In democratic societies such as the United States, radio was part of the rise of a consumer society or culture and was used to advertise and sell goods, such as laundry detergent. It was important for those selling products to have knowledge about consumer tastes. The desire for such knowledge led to the development of forms of market research, which mainly used quantitative methods. Such methods were also used by pioneering sociologists, such as Paul Lazarsfeld, who sought to measure and understand the audience for academic purposes.

The rise of mass-mediated forms of communication in the twentieth century led to concerns about effects on society and individuals. In its early days, radio was thought to potentially be a tool in the hands of political propagandists (especially in the total itarian states of the USSR and Nazi Germany). Messages would be determined by political elites, and audiences would be brainwashed. From the early days of discussion about audiences, in democratic and nondemocratic societies, there has been concern about and research into political manipulation and the wider effects of the control of media messages by those possessing political power and control over economic production. Marxist analysts and researchers (such as Theodor Adorno and Max Hork heimer) were particularly exercised by such ideas.

Such concern, which emphasizes manipulation and control, is familiar from common sense and media discourse. Anxiety is expressed about the way in which individuals, values, or behavior are affected by the messages contained in the media. Particular worry is expressed about vulnerable members of society (especially children or the socially isolated) and about the way in which a society or a culture is degraded by the power of media forms. The media are regarded as stimuli that provoke certain reactions on the part of individuals or that lead to social states akin to being drugged. The media are seen to influence or affect audience behavior through such mechanisms. Such ideas were often based in journalistic [Page 73]accounts of society and culture or were derived from experimental research on audience members carried out in the psychology laboratory. A problem with the latter was that they tended to decontextualize the media experience from aspects of lived social life.

Research on effects was criticized by the academic uses and gratifications approach to the study of audiences, which studied the way that individuals use the media to gratify wants or needs. Much consumer and market research also derives from assumptions about consumers satisfying individual needs through their purchases. Uses and gratification studies also tended to isolate such individual needs from influences by family, friends, colleagues, and so on.

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