Dear Annemone and others.
You are right to say that sometimes those working in the field of
qualitative audience research write as if this is the only way to study
and understand audiences. I hope I didn't give that impression. I
think, though, that there is a particular problem in the field of
violence research, because of the overwhelmingly administrative
conception of research that has dominated there ( see Willard Rowlands'
brilliant book (THE POLITICS OF TV VIOLENCE) on this ). For those who
haven't yet come across it, there is an excellent new book from Sage, by
Andy Ruddock (UNDERSTANDING AUDIENCES), on media audience research which
has two very thoughtful chapters on the mass communication research
tradition which offers a much more nuanced account of what that
tradition contained than a number of more potboiler versions.
Martin Barker
|