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Audience Research Influences

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The influences of media are growing exponentially along with the technology development in the last several centuries. Media evolves originally from the books, magazines, visual and audio recordings to television, radio and films, and now to the new media relying on the digital technologies. Nowadays, almost everyone lives with the support of new media in the daily life. Accordingly, the research of media is also dependent on the evolutions. Thus, this essay will discuss the impacts of new media on audience research from the respects of both values and challenges. 1. Audience Research Audience research, in the qualitative research background, involves a relatively small amount of participants aiming to generate a more detailed and in …show more content…

Jane Brown and Laurie Schulze (1990) point out that selecting a specific group of target audience usually requires the researchers to ascribe the audience to some certain characteristics, desires or needs, desires, despite of the varieties in their demographic features. Besides, the audience is viewed as a construction that is motivated by the paradigm where the research is built. There are basically three epistemologies in audience research, i.e. reception research, audience ethnography and constructionist research. Methodologies involved in the audience research vary from different subjects and research purposes. Traditional methods of an audience research can be interview, focus group and ethnography, etc., which regard the audience as a passive subject (Livingstone, Sonia, 1998). Meanwhile, the criticism of these approaches states that the results of these methods are highly dependent on the researchers’ expertise to interpret the participants’ response and reveal the truth of the topic. In the contrary, the recent trend in audience research tends to view the audience as an active subject (Karen Ross and Virginia Nightingale, 2003), who will actively engage with the culture and act as the expert of their own experiences. Thus, the research approaches will focus more on the audience's own expertise and the meanings of their experiences to them. One example of this argument is the creative or reflective research technique which requires the

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