Focusing on qualitative methods, The Pocketbook of Audience Research uses contemporary, global television and cross-media examples to explain essential approaches to audience research and outline how they can be employed.
This handy guide is divided into three parts: the first part, ‘Watching Post-Television’, offers ‘television’ as a shortcut to understanding today’s platform media and gives an introduction to key theoretical terms such as representation, identity and community. The second part, ‘Methods with Method’, introduces different methodological tools to study cross-media texts and practices from an audience-led perspective. With individual chapters covering ethnography, textual analysis and visual methodologies, this part also functions as a toolset and starting point for small research projects. The third part, ‘Methods in Action’, offers a variety of recent case studies to show how these methodological principles work in practice.
Drawing on different genres from drama to sports, The Pocketbook of Audience Research gives a sense of what audience-led cross-media research can achieve. This concise, accessible book gives students, early-career researchers and creative professionals the tools to do useful and inspiring audience research, whether for a paper, a proposal or a market survey.
Part I CROSS-MEDIA EVERYDAY MEANING-MAKING 1. INTRODUCTION. Audience research and the cross-media reality of post-television 2. USEFUL (KEY) THEORETICAL TERMS: Reconceptualizing audience research for deeply mediatized societies Part II METHODS WITH METHOD: A METHODIC OVERVIEW OF ENGAGING WITH AUDIENCES 3. AUDIENCE RESEARCH: Methods of Data Collection and Data Analysis Need One Another ❤ 4. ETHNOGRAPHY: Or: How to understand the Value of Presence with Mariam Yassein 5. AUDIENCE-LED ANALYSIS: Or: on how to be invited ‘in’ 6. VISUAL ANALYSIS. Or: How images and words ‘mean’ together 7. THEORIZATION: Or: How to get from data to theory Part III CASE STUDIES: METHODS IN ACTION 8. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE: Private Attraction, Public (Dis)Approval? Negotiating what to make of Netflix’s You 9. DATA ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE. Data-Scraping Meets the Regency Era: Bridgerton Commentary on YouTube with Clair Richards 10. COLLABORATIVE AUTOETHNOGRAPHY IN PRACTICE. “You knock on my door”: An Insider-Outsider View of Turkish Soap Operas and Fan Labour 11. MEDIA DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE. Aren’t We Friends Anymore? Watching and Rewatching the Sitcom 12. ETHNOGRAPHY VERSUS FOCUS GROUP RESEARCH IN PRACTICE. Sports Talk: Watching, Feeling and Connecting 13. VISUAL ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE. Working through, laughing on: Pandemic politics, Cultural Citizenship and Action Heroes 14. THE LONG INTERVIEW IN PRACTICE: Looking back: Remembering favorite teen television shows with Erinn Rövekamp 15 Afterthought
Biography
Joke Hermes is a Dutch media and cultural studies researcher. She has published widely on popular culture, audience research and feminist analysis of gender and diversity. Currently, she is a Professor of Practice-based Research in Media, Culture and Citizenship at Inholland University; she teaches media studies at the University of Amsterdam. She was Founding Editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Cultural Citizenship and Popular Culture: The Art of Listening.
Linda Kopitz combines her professional experience as a creative director with her academic research on technology and everyday meaning-making. Her PhD research – situated between urban studies and media studies – explores the entanglement between real and virtual environments in sustainable architecture. As an interdisciplinary and practice-based scholar, she currently works as a Lecturer in Cross-Media Culture in Germany and The Netherlands. In parallel, she continues her professional work, with a specific focus on the sensory dimensions of communication.
"The Pocketbook of Audience Research is a page turner which will really help a lot of audience researchers. A fun, empowering, creative, and interesting binge pocketbook!"
Sofie Van Bauwel
