Research: Audiences

AUDIENCE: A KEY CONCEPT 

Media texts are all produced with a audience in mind, an audience will always remain a key part of the equation. Each media text produced is planned with a particular audience in mind and the television producer must explain to the broadcasting institution (e.g. BBC or ITV) who are the likely audience for their particular programme. Whereas, the media producer has to know who is their potential audience and they need to know as much about them as possible.

TYPES OF AUDIENCE RESEARCH

There are different ways of profiling audiences’ such as using socioeconomics, demographics and psychographics. 

Demographics - this defines the adult population largely by the work that they do labelling them by using a letter code to describe income and status of the members of the each group. 

Psychographics - This is a way of describing an audience by looking at the behaviour and personality traits of its members. They are a particular type of person and makes an assessment about their viewing and spending habits. Young and Rubican is an advertising agency that invents a successful psychographic profile known as their 4C’s Marketing Model, the 4C’s stand for: Cross, Cultural, Consumer, Characterisation 

EXIT POLLS

The BFI carries put exit polls to engage audience response at film screenings. 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
We learn about higher order needs using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Once people needs that relate to safety and the physically environment, such as: food, drink, shelter and warmth are met, people then are in the position to aspire and aim higher and culture meets a lot of 
these needs. 

WHY AUDIENCES CONSUME TEXTS: THE USES AND GRATIFICATIONS MODEL

We look at different models of audience behaviour. The uses and gratification model of audience behaviour (Blumler and Katz, 1974), explains some of our higher order needs. 

During the 1960s, the first generation to grow up with television became adults, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming media texts. Audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. 

In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:

Surveillance

Correlation

Entertainment

Cultural transmission

Individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes:

Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.

Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life

Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts

Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

TWO STEP FLOW THEORY

Katz and Lazarsfeld assumes a more active audience that suggests messages from the media move in two distinct ways.

Firstly, individuals who are opinion leaders, receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content.

The information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience, but is filtered through the opinion leaders who then pass it on to a more passive audience.

The audience then intervene with the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow.

This theory appears to reduce the power of the media, and some researchers concluded that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpret their texts. This led to the idea of active audiences.

THE MEDIA EFFECTS MODEL (HYPODERMIC SYRINGE MODEL)

This theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data.

The Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciousness of the direct audience, e.g. the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by the media producers. It assumes that the audience are passive. This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts, for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves.

STUDIES USED TO SUPPORT THE EFFECTS MODEL

- Children watched a video where an  adult violently attacked a clown toy called Bobo Doll. 

- The children were then taken to a room with attractive toys that they not permitted to touch 

the children were then led to another room with Bobo Dolls

- 88% of the children imitated the violent behaviour that they had earlier viewed. 8 months later 40% of the children reproduced the same violent effect