Audience

Throughout the lengthy history of qualitative research and evaluation, inquiry and writing processes have been engaged in with one primary audience in mind: researchers and academics within particular fields under study. Secondary audiences have occasionally included the participants/informants who are the focus of the research and, for research designed with a cathartic or self-therapeutic end in mind (e.g., some autoethnography), the researchers themselves. Still other audiences (at least within program evaluation research) have included policymakers and administrators overseeing social or training programs in various fields (e.g., social work, nursing, education) and participants involved in those programs.

Although some qualitative researchers are committed to making research results available to readers outside of academia, others (such as program evaluators) have rarely contemplated the possibility of broadening the accessibility of their work. This reluctance has been criticized as perpetuating the insular character of some social science texts. Their tendency to alienate nonacademic audiences is viewed as ironic by some when the text aims at redressing injustices that plague the lives of members of marginalized social groups. This aim may be betrayed by the employment of discursive elements that render the text inaccessible to the very “subjects” whose plight is being documented.

Arts-based researchers—qualitative inquirers who swap the premises, principles, and procedures associated with the social sciences for those of the literary, visual, plastic, performance, vernacular, or digital arts—have also largely inquired and composed for a narrow audience of academic colleagues. Some advocates and practitioners of arts-based research have, however, attempted to look beyond the academy for an audience of members of lay publics. The production of inquiry texts with the potential for influencing both lay audiences and academics (insofar as the latter are both scholars and citizens) is sometimes referred to as “audience blending.” Arts-based works that have been composed for broader “blended” audiences have included novels, short stories, films, and staged ethnodramas.

Some arts-based researchers who also emphasize issues of social justice and equity aspire toward a mass audience by producing works with the potential for becoming significant cultural events. These works thereby move to subvert the prevailing cultural meta-narratives regarding race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and so on by dissemination through mass media outlets.

Of course, many obstacles may impede these efforts toward audience blending. First, the larger culture industry is not easy to penetrate. A second class of impediments arises out of the many hallowed traditions of the academy. Finally, there is the fact that all cultural texts are limited in their ability to reach readers who do not share the cultural background and social values of the researchers/artists.

Some arts-based researchers attempt to surmount these obstacles by identifying with a larger tradition of activist art. The efforts of many activist artists, who aim toward personal and social transformation, tend to be “local” efforts, participatory and community based, outside of the academy, and bypassing the mass media. Consider, for example, the applied theater projects that attempt to intervene directly in the history of a community. Members of rather circumscribed “publics at large” are both the participants within this work and the audiences of this work.

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