Listening to Audiences: A Brief Rationale and History of Audience Research in Popular Media Studies

Abstract

Popular media may be described as television, film, radio, and print media primarily offered for the purpose of entertainment. Such popular media have been the object of critical analysis for decades, both for academic scholars and popular pundits. Our focus is not on quantitative or experimental research concerning popular media effects, but instead on qualitative scholarship that seeks to interpret and critically engage such media. For the past several decades, scholarship informed only by the critic's analysis of the so-called texts of popular media has been augmented by scholarship that recognizes the need to listen to audience members. The point of this article is to provide a brief rationale and history of such audience research.

Acknowledgments

Edward Schiappa is Professor and Chair, and Emanuelle Wessels is a doctoral student, in the Communication Studies Department of the University of Minnesota.

Notes

¹Our thanks to University of Minnesota student Sgt. Brandon Hlavka (2005) for drawing attention to how masculinity is performed in Jarhead.

²Note that the text encountered was far from randomly selected. Cagney and Lacey was a show with a self-conscious ideological perspective (D' Acci, 1994), and the episode Condit (1989) studied concerned the volatile issue of abortion. How meanings are contested with such texts could be quite different than with the many programs that try to avoid being political. Only with further audience research can we learn how typical or generalizable Condit's findings are.

³For example, Rockler (2001a) noted that while all her research participants agreed that the film Fried Green Tomatoes did not include an overt depiction of lesbian sex, the participants' willingness to call the relationship between the two main characters (Idgie and Ruth) as a lesbian relationship depended on how they defined such relationships prior to viewing the film.

We are grateful for the assistance of Jennifer Stromer-Galley and Jessica Prody in reviewing the contents of the journals mentioned.