Psychosocial Methods and Audience Research

Abstract

The previous chapter argued that the experience of watching favourite films and television, particularly in the domestic or home environment, should be understood psychosocially. Within Communication and Media Studies, prior to recent developments on viewing and affect, the idea of researching unconscious communication was eschewed. Established approaches in empirical audience research have generally started from the assumption that it is mainly cultural and social differences, such as class and gender, that are significant in knowledge production (Seiter, 1990). Making audience research on the interpretation of meaning and identity largely focussed on processes that work one way: outer to inner. As a corrective to this, Chapter 1 introduced ideas from psychoanalysis to offer some perspectives on inner processes, such as unconscious personalising of texts and the idea of an intermediate area of experiencing. Reality is not something objectively perceived, but something that is also subjective and with internal dynamics. Inevitably, this has implications for epistemologies that “draw a line between subject and object” and the social and the psychic (Young, 2009). Psychosocial insights inexorably point to the need to review established methods and interpretive paradigms and epistemological assumptions. This chapter offers, therefore, an account of a psychoanalytically informed method used in a study which represents one of the first attempts to apply such new approaches to audience research.