Audience Research Ethnography

Ethnography plays a key role in doing qualitative audience research. Traditional audience research is using quantitative study of positivism paradigm, which aims to measure the media effects on the audience. These studies with may use statistics methods to calculate the rate of reading and ratings or design questionnaires to the audience in order to collect the statistical data of the audience reactions. Hall (1980) claims that there are three models for the audience to interpret the meaning towards medium. It meaning that audience research is based on the spontaneity of the audience. Thus, Hall’s encoding-decoding model opens a new page of audience research. Moreover, the audience is becoming increasingly fragmented, individualised, dispersed, no longer addressable as a mass (Ien Ang, 1996, p.67). Thus, an increasing number of scholars conduct research on the audience and the process of audience reception towards media messages. This approach applied to the media

In the past, most of the researches may concentrate on the text and discourse which is transferred by the medium to understand the audience reactions. However, with the application of ethnography, exploring the rules of daily life with mass communication and the relationship between medium consumption and societal culture may be seen as the main topic towards audience research. It is important to understand the different contexts of the audience instead of the media discourse. As Clifford and Marcus (1986) indicates that cultures always help people construct a temporal focus on selection, simplification and rejection, while it is able for people to build relationships with themselves and others. Thus, ‘ethnographic turn’ within audience research can be considered as a new theory and method to understand mass communication and culture, which may pay more attention to the societal meaning of medium