Audience research

Overview

Audience research is the practice of collecting information about a group of people concerning their use or consumption of a particular type or instance of information media. The medium of interest to the audience could be any of a wide variety, from books to movies to television or newspapers. The medium could also be a more specific instance of one of these types, such as mystery novels, action films, or situation comedies on television. Because there are so many different types of media, each with its own audience, there are many ways of categorizing the types of audience research one may perform. Audience research can be studied with regard to the type of media the audience is interested in, the characteristics of the audience, the manner in which the media is consumed (paper or digital, mobile or desktop, audio, etc.), the purpose of the research, and many other reasons.

The study of audience characteristics is a type of audience research that has a long history. In its most basic form, this research is intended to answer the basic question of who is interested in the material being presented. This may appear counterintuitive at first, as one would expect that the creators of the material would be aware of some of the characteristics of their audience: a sports broadcast would have a largely male audience, for example. However, it often turns out that assumptions such as this are incorrect; one might be surprised to discover, for example, that most viewers of professional tennis matches are women (hypothetically). If audience research were not conducted, then this information would remain hidden. In other cases, a type of media might be so new that even its creators are not certain about whom it appeals to. An example would be a website that launches with the intention of presenting an online encyclopedia of comic books. While one would assume that the audience of this site would primarily consist of children and young adults, it could happen that audience research would reveal that many of its users are adults employed as librarians or new media scholars, and that they use the site to assist with their scholarly work. As these examples illustrate, audience research that focuses on the characteristics of the audience usually collects, at a minimum, demographic information such as age, gender, occupation, level of education, level of income, household composition, and so forth. Even these basic details give audience researchers important insights about who is interested in the work. In addition to basic, demographic details, researchers may inquire further into the opinions and attitudes of an audience. This could involve inquiry into audience members' views on specific publications or programs, or it could concern their outlook on general types of media (Smart, 2014). Questions of this type might ask if one generally prefers comedies, romances, or dramas; if one is more interested in reading books in a series or books that stand alone; or even what a family's television viewing habits are—do they watch programs together or while alone.

Clearly, there are an almost unlimited number of questions that audience researchers might wish to ask. This begs the question of why anyone would be interested in the answers to these questions, and a useful method of categorizing types of audience research is by the goal of the research. By far the most common motivation for audience research is advertising (Jungwirth, 2016). Advertising, of course, is the practice of a company or other organization promoting its services by paying money to media creators in return for them including mention of the company and its products in its media output. Billboards, television commercials, movie tie-ins and fast food promotions—all of these have become part of modern life. These types of advertising are so ubiquitous that people tend to forget that not only are they selling something, but they are also the reason that a movie or television program was made: advertisers provide the money that is used to create the media, and the media is then used to promote the advertisers' messages. If advertisers see that no one likes the media that their advertising has paid for, then they will quickly respond by either changing the media to be more appealing, or by taking their advertising dollars elsewhere. Because of these dynamics, it is absolutely vital for advertisers to have a thorough understanding of their audience, so that they know who buys their products and what types of media those people are interested in (Nisbet, Maibach & Leiserowitz, 2011). For this reason, audience research intended for use in advertising seeks to find out or confirm who the audience is, as well as how they feel about the media and what, if anything, they would like to be different. Television ratings are one form of audience research that has long been used for advertising purposes. The agency conducting the research identifies a sample of households that represents a cross-section of society, and ensures that those selected to be in the sample are willing to participate. These households then have special equipment installed to make it possible to monitor their television viewing behavior. This equipment records who watches what and at what time, and transmits this information to the research agency. Once received, it is used to analyze what types of programs and commercials have the largest numbers of viewers, or the smallest number of people who avoid particular programming—for example, changing the channel when an especially annoying commercial appears on the screen. When a program has high ratings, this means that large numbers of people are interested enough in the program to turn it on and leave it on (Buckingham, 2013).

Further Insights

In the past, television was distributed through analog broadcasts, making it impossible to determine how many people were watching a particular program, without either asking them directly or installing monitoring equipment in their homes. Technological advances in how media is distributed and consumed have made it much easier to conduct some forms of audience research. The majority of media is distributed digitally, either through cable or streaming services. This digital distribution makes it easy to record who is watching what, without having to conduct interviews or install special equipment—the computers that stream the media also keep track of how many views a program gets, and associates this with information about the viewer that was obtained when the viewer signed up for the service. Most services require that one answer a number of demographic questions when creating an account, so the company knows how many people are in the household, their approximate ages, genders, the household income bracket, and so forth. When multiple people live in a household and use the streaming service, there is often an option for each person to have his or her own profile. While this is presented as a convenient way to personalize one's media experience, its primary purpose is to make the information being collected more granular and accurate. Instead of the streaming company having to guess about which member of the household watches a particular program, the viewer profile option (assuming it is used consistently) allows viewers to volunteer this information (Mathieu, 2015).

Not surprisingly, this sort of audience research has raised significant concerns about privacy. While the audience research industry often presents it as unobtrusive inasmuch as it operates behind the scenes and rarely do viewers realize that their viewing habits are constantly being recorded and analyzed, this unobtrusiveness is part of the reason for privacy advocates' concern. In the past, audience research was generally not connected with the specific identity of any of the research participants; the information gained was analyzed in the aggregate. This means that a research finding might show, for example, that 23 percent of those viewing the six o'clock evening news are under the age of eighteen. Digital media distribution means that audience research could show that a (hypothetical) person named Barbara Alvarez watched the news for precisely seven minutes and forty-two seconds, at which time she changed the channel and started watching a documentary about the migratory patterns of Canadian geese. As this example illustrates, when highly specific information can be correlated with an individual's identity, privacy becomes a real concern, on a number of levels (Athique, 2018). First, there are many situations in which a person might not want others to know anything about their media consumption habits or preferences and having this information on file with the media distributor vastly increases the chances of such information being accessed without authorization. The information could be used for purposes the viewer is not comfortable with, or the information could be accessed by an unauthorized third party, if the media distributor is hacked and its viewership database compromised. It is also possible that access to one's viewing history could be sold to another company by the media distributor. In all of these scenarios, viewers are left with the unsettling feeling that huge corporations know a great deal about their personal lives, with no clear limits on what can be done with this information (Sender, 2015).

Issues

Audience research has received criticism from parties in addition to those concerned with privacy. Long before digital media made privacy a major issue, there were questions about the accuracy of audience research and about its methodological soundness. The issue of accuracy is related to the distinction between a passive audience and an engaged audience for a particular program. A passive audience is one that has the program turned on, but is not necessarily paying attention to it, or indeed even present during its broadcast. Passive viewing of this sort could involve a person turning on a program simply to have a source of background noise while cooking, cleaning, or engaging in some other activity. In other cases, passive viewing can involve timeshifting through the use of some type of digital recording or streaming, where the program is available to watch at any time. Whatever the form or motivation for passive viewing, it decreases the accuracy of audience research because it gives researchers the impression that a program is receiving more of the public's attention than it actually is (Mytton, 2011).

Other concerns about audience research pertain to issues that are problematic for those who are the consumers of the research products: media companies and advertisers. For these organizations, some of the research methods that are still being used despite the digital revolution are less than satisfactory, either because they are too slow or too rigidly constructed. The slowness of audience research often has to do with the method of information collection; surveys of viewer habits and preferences take time to collect and analyze, as do the so-called "diaries" that other research relies upon (these diaries are logs of media consumption that consumers are asked to keep and periodically send in). The availability of digital feedback instantaneously, even while a broadcast is occurring, makes it much more difficult to tolerate audience research that takes days or weeks to compile. In other types of media, such as radio, audience research has been criticized for not providing enough options for consumers to provide feedback about the type of media they want to listen to; researchers continue to use question formats based on traditional broadcasting practices. These allow consumers to indicate their preferences about those practices, but leave no room for feedback that is broader in scope (Livingstone, 2013).

It is worth noting most audience research is conducted in the hope that the information being gathered will have predictive value. That is, by studying what audiences have watched in the past or are watching in the present, researchers hope to be able to say with certainty what types of media will or will not be likely to succeed with a given audience type. A media company might want to know if viewers are still interested in procedural crime dramas focusing on the collection of evidence by forensic pathologists, or if the market for this type of program has become saturated. This would help guide decisions about what types of programming to pursue. At the same time, there is also audience research that has the goal not of helping advertisers and media companies increase profits, but of creating a deeper understanding of social movements and trends (Kruger, Fourei & Dick, 2013). In many cases, audience research can help to reveal general attitudes about issues that, viewed over time, can illustrate the ways in which people view themselves and those around them. These insights may be useful not only to advertisers and media producers, but also to politicians, legislators, historians, and scholars in the social sciences.

Bibliography

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Jungwirth, B. (2016). Revitalising audience research: Innovations in European audience research. Technical Communication, 63(4), 378.

Kruger, J., Fourei, I., & Dick, A. L. (2013). Positioning audience research for public dialogue: A doubledialogical approach. Mousaion, 31(2), 58–77.

Levordashka, Ana, Danae Stanton Fraser, and Iain D. Gilchrist. (2023 June 29). Measuring real-time cognitive engagement in remote audiences. Scientific Reports, 13, doi.org/10.1038%2Fs41598-023-37209-7

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Nisbet, M. C., Maibach, E., & Leiserowitz, A. (2011). Framing peak petroleum as a public health problem: Audience research and participatory engagement in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 101(9), 1620–1626. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2011.300230

Roseman, E. (2022, November 16). Conducting audience research. Membership Guide, https://membershipguide.org/handbook/getting-started-with-membership/conducting-audience-research

Sender, K. (2015). Reconsidering reflexivity: Audience research and reality television. Communication Review, 18(1), 37–52. doi:10.1080/10714421.2015.996414

Smart, B. (2014). The BBC television audience research reports, 1957–1979: Recorded opinions and invisible expectations. Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 34(3), 452–462. doi:10.1080/01439685.2014.937187