AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

Audience Analysis

Audience Analysis

Audience analysis stems from mass communication studies that seek to explain the impact of various forms of media on social life. Analysis may also focus on groups whose members were unintended receptors of the content and who repurpose the information in ways the sender does not anticipate or condone. Such repurposing can alter the relationship between the audience and the sender (McQuaial, 2007). Audience analysis is sometimes referred to as reception analysis and is also associated with focus group research. This paper is based on communicating the recent sales information to audiences of a firm.

Central to most contemporary perspectives in the study of leadership and communication is the notion that leadership is symbolically or socially constructed (Austin, 2006). In other words, leadership is viewed as an ongoing “conversation” between leaders and followers in which “talk” or communication can be conceived of as doing the work of leadership, that is, reducing uncertainty and ambiguity and facilitating a group toward accomplishing shared goals and objectives. Thus, whether in communicating his or her vision of the future to a large group of followers or in conducting his or her everyday and routine interactions with others, the leader is inescapably involved in the communicative processes of managing meaning and “framing” reality (McQuaial, 2007).

In this view, information reception is a deeply cultural dynamic process that interprets, reinterprets, and recontextualizes. Socioeconomic factors can define culture—and thereby audiences—as can codes of discourse or physical media those individuals select to receive information. In all cases, audience analysis research focuses on interpretive communities and anticipates multilayered interpretations between sender and receptor that both synchronistically duplicate and asynchronistically reconstruct meaning (Austin, 2006).

Qualitative research incorporating principles of audience analysis and the examination of multiple levels of conflicting forms of meaning is not limited to mass communication studies. For ...