The Pocketbook of Audience Research

By: Joke Hermes and Linda Kopitz

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Synopsis: 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.