Audience Analysis

Audience analysis stems from mass communication studies that seek to explain the impact of various forms of media on social life. In qualitative research, audience analysis refers to inquiry into how a targeted group receives and uses content delivered by an identified sender. Analysis may also focus on groups whose members were unintended receptors of the content and who repurpose the information in ways the sender does not anticipate or condone. Such repurposing can alter the relationship between the audience and the sender. Audience analysis is sometimes referred to as reception analysis and is also associated with focus group research.

Contemporary mass communication studies can trace the theoretical origins of audience analysis to Walter Benjamin's early 20th-century criticism of cinema, particularly the reproducibility, worldwide accessibility, and devaluation of an authentic original in the then newly emergent art form of film. Benjamin was one of the first theorists to consider the shifting role of the audience from a passive appreciator of a fixed knowable meaning in a work of art to a dynamic interactant in which individuals and groups created their own meanings and responses.

On a practical nontheoretical level, audience analysis evolved from focus group research that emerged during World War II. The first focus group studies pertained to military research. During the postwar era, these skills were applied to commercial marketing as an audience was associated with potential consumers of a given product. Data analysis from these studies was exclusively quantitative.

Qualitative audience analysis became widespread during the 1980s. The change in methodology also reflected a growing critical stance toward mass communication. Qualitative researchers were not concerned with honing a sender's content for acceptance by the largest number of audience members. Instead, they investigated processes for the reception and mediation of information that both duplicated and reconstructed social structures. Through this evolution, the field moved away from empirical survey and focus group research to examination of forms of power. In some cases, power sought and achieved social replication. In other cases, research suggested direct or passive resistance to existing social paradigms. For example, in Common Culture, Paul Willis studied the lives of counterculture British youth who had repurposed popular culture to form individual identities that openly challenged social norms.

Mass communication delivers content through a variety of ways. An audience receives and mediates content in a variety of ways as well. For example, audience analysis studies have examined how European and non-Western audiences repurpose U.S. television soap operas. In such research, an audience is not a blank slate; recipients process and reappropriate content into new meanings.

In studies of the repurposing of mass communication, the use of symbols and signs does not tend to be highly dynamic. The variance within usage is usually rather narrow. Such predictable outcomes from repurposing suggest a limited capacity for audiences to create new meanings in response to expanding forms of media. Thus, rather than focusing on construction of meaning, it may be more fruitful to analyze patterns and rhythms of conventional practice.

In this view, information reception is a deeply cultural dynamic process that interprets, reinterprets, and recontextualizes. Socioeconomic factors can define culture—and thereby audiences—as can codes of discourse or physical media that individuals select to receive information. In all cases, audience analysis research focuses on interpretive communities and anticipates multilayered interpretations between sender and receptor that both synchronistically duplicate and asynchronistically reconstruct meaning.

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