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.
About the Author: 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. As an interdisciplinary and practice-based scholar in the environmental humanities, she currently works as a lecturer in Cross-Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at Inholland University. In parallel, she continues her professional work, with a specific focus on the sensory dimensions of communication.
