Challenges Posed in Researching Media Audiences - Essay Example

THE CHALLENGES POSED IN RESEARCHING MEDIA AUDIENCES INTRODUCTION: Electronic media have the power to create global impact, unifying ‘the global village’ with instant access to world news, and instant live communication between any two points on the globe. According to Jensen (2002: 196), electronic media have powerful transforming effects on the character of social time and space, shrinking both to a considerable extent. In today’s complex digital and multi-media environment, the different dimensions of media relationships, and the notion of interactivity are changed completely. The tradition of audience research is considered as valuable by authors Morley and Barker who want the contribution of audience research to extend beyond what they term mere “stories” (Press, 2007: 95). The real legacy of audience research in the age of the new conservatism, is recognition of the current times as politically significant, and its impact on audience research (Press, 2007: 99). DISCUSSION: Audience Research: Research on users of information systems, and the World Wide Web environment which combines the features of an information system with many potentially entertaining visuals should be studied using the gratification theory. When there are a variety of different channels to choose from, our understanding of individual’s selection as well as use behaviour may be enhanced, according to Iyer (1998: 14). It is an accepted fact that television presents a distorted view of reality (Bryant; Zillmann, 2002: 69). Researchers, media critics, television executives, and the general public are interested in knowing whether the distortion has any effect on people, and if so, why and to what extent. Over the past few decades there have been two persistent criticisms against media effects research: one is that the evidence accumulated till date show very little indication of media effects on people’s psyche, behaviour, etc, in spite of the myth of “massive media impact”. The second criticism of media effects research is that it has for the most part lacked any focus on explanatory mechanisms. Barker (2007: 128) states that researchers felt the need for a fully elaborate audience research paradigm, and responded to it by developing the Uses and Gratifications Tradition. The virtues of this essay which has not yet been published, and the research that lay behind it, are the attempt to combine in a mutually informative way, a theoretical framework, working concepts, methods of enquiry, research implements and paradigmatic studies. Audience research in the United Kingdom, and consequently in the rest of Europe was conceived and constructed under Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding model (Hall, Stuart, 1992: 31 as quoted in Barker (2007: 128). This model created a conceptualization of text-audience relations which could simultaneously treat texts as culturally formed items and also include their ideological functions. Any departure from the model only served to move it to the background, rather than unfold a new approach. Media Effect: Even though research to date has shown remarkably small media effects, there are a number of possibilities that may help in proving the massive effects notion. (Bryant; Zillmann, 2002: 70). The small main effects may be obscured by messages of different effects on different groups, or as a function of different situations, and by focusing on direct effects at the expense of indirect ones. Thus the development of cognitive process models for media effects has the potential to uncover new relations as well as make sense out of old ones. The results of various studies show that the effects of violent content on television can lead to increased viewer aggression. Research based on uses and gratifications perspective show that motives and other viewer characteristics influence effects. Since aggression is of intense interest to society, the study of such factors should augment previous research to find the variables that may contribute to viewer aggression attributed to television violence (Haridakis, 2007: 227-228) The Uses and Gratifications Paradigm: In the field of communication studies, uses and gratifications is essentially the dominant paradigm for explaining media exposure. It has been applied to a wide range of conventional mass media as well as to interpersonal communication and now to the internet (LaRose, et al, 2001: 396). Uses and gratifications theory assumes that audiences actively seek out media in a goal-directed way, that provides them with the means of gratifying a wide variety of needs. In recent years the theory has been reformulated to stress comparisons between the gratifications sought from a medium, with gratifications obtained. The main components of uses and gratifications include the psychological and social environment, needs and motives to communicate, the media, attitudes and expectations about the media, functional alternatives to using the media, communication behaviour and outcomes of behaviour (Bryant; Zillmann, 2002: 527). Uses and gratifications sees media audiences as variably active communicators, rather than passive recipients of messages. To explain media effects, it is first necessary to understand the characteristics, motivation, selectivity and involvement of audience members. Bryant; Zillmann (2002: 526) state that uses and gratification is a psychological communication perspective. The psychological perspective stresses individual use and choice. Researchers seek to explain media effects in terms of the purposes, functions, uses and gratifications as controlled by the choice patterns of receivers. Theory of Gratification: An equivalent for the General Theory of Gratification would be difficult to envision. The emphasis in cultural studies research into audiences is on the specificity of responses, where sustenance of generalization would not be possible. Any working conceptualization which combined different types of audiences for different areas of media programmes or publications, would not be possible, as the categories are diverse and cannot be grouped together. The tendency to group all the audiences together has resulted in critics suggesting that audience research amounts to only clever description. The researchers are accused of telling “interesting stories” of particular texts and audiences and contexts. The General Theory of Gratification is considered to be narrow in its approach (Barker, 2007: 129). Uses Theory: Dervin and Nilan (as quoted in Iyer, 1998: 8), identified and contrasted two different paradigms applied to user studies: system oriented and user oriented approaches. In studies with system-oriented approach, users are viewed as passive receivers of information, and users’ external behaviour is viewed as an isolated situation. These studies assume that user behaviour stay the same across time and space. Variables with which system-oriented studies are concerned are often demographic information on users: age, gender, etc. As the view of the user’s position as the unit of analysis moves to a more centralized component of the field, the amount and type of user behaviour research will increase dramatically. A method is often chosen because it offers the best approach for answering the research question posed. In making a decision about a research method, the research problem should always come first. The experimental approach, interview techniques, written user surveys, transaction log analysis, and study of unconscious cognition are the different methods employed for user research (Iyer, 1998: 14). Internet Usage: The uses and gratifications framework explains media use in terms of expected positive outcomes. Several studies have applied uses and gratifications to explain Internet usage. Previous uses and gratifications research accounted for little variance in internet behaviour, although there were conflicting results. New research identifies further variables from social-cognitive theory that might further explain Internet usage and resolve inconsistencies in prior research. In a survey of 171 college students, the social-cognitive model explained 60% of the available variance in Internet usage using multiple regression analysis, a significant improvement over prior uses and gratifications research (LaRose, et al, 2001: 395) Conclusion: The various groups of media audiences were studied through research, by uses and gratifications theory, to understand the extent and types of media effects on audiences. Gender differences were found to be negligible, and the effect of violence viewed by school boys was seen to last for some time, after which it was replaced by normal behaviour. There is scope for future research on this topic as introduction of new technology is an ongoing process. REFERENCES Barker, Martin (2007). “I Have Seen the Future and It is Not Here Yet” or “On Being Ambitious for Audience Research”. The Communication Review. Vol. 9, Issue 2: pp.123-141. Bryant, Jennings; Zillmann, Dolf. (2002). Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. United States: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Haridakis, Paul M. (2007). “Men, Women and Televised Violence: Predicting Viewer Aggression in Male and Female Television Viewers”. Communication Quarterly, Vol.54, No.2: pp. 227-225. Iyer, Hemalatha. (1998). Electronic Resources: Use and User Behaviour. New York: The Haworth Press Inc. Jensen, Klaus Bruhn. (2002). A Handbook of Media and Communications Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Methodologies. United Kingdom: Routledge. LaRose, Robert; Mastro, Dana; Eastin, Matthew S. (2001). “Understanding Internet Usage: A Social Cognitive Approach to Uses and Gratifications”. Social Science Computer Review, Vol.19, No.4, Winter 2001: pp.395-413. Press, Andrea L. (2007). “Audience Research in the Post-Audience Age: An Introduction to Barker and Morley”. The Communication Review, Vol.9, No.2: pp.93-100. Read More