Studying Audiences

Compare retailer offers

About this product

Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real provides a critical overview of cultural studies research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as `a new and exciting phase' in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of `ordinary people' watching television, combining interviews and participant observation with textual analysis of television programmes. This early research attempted to document the premises of theories of spectatorship and reception. In a comprehensive analysis of the origins and achievements of the `cultural studies audience experiment', Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley's work on Nationwide , Ien Ang's Watching Dallas and David Buckingham's study of EastEnders and its audience. Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies have been challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a multi-faceted activity.

More from Taylor & Francis Ltd