Audience reception

The chapter provides a concise description of reception analysis by situat-ing this research tradition in the historical and contemporary landscapes of audience research. It traces reception research to its roots in a research landscape dominated by effects and uses-and-gratifications research around 1980, and succinctly describes its theoretical and methodological DNA as lodged in the empirical study of the ways in which audiences make contextualized sense of their encounters with mediated meanings. More recently reception researchers have extended their empirical domain to also include audiences’ sense-making navigation in the mediatized world across legacy, digital, and social media. In parallel, the original focus on qualitative inter-view methods has been extended to include varieties of mixed methods, including methods for tracking people’s digital footprints in their social and cultural contexts. The chapter argues that audience reception processes can usefully be analyzed in terms of their multidimensionality, as sense-making practices driven by audiences’ perceived worthwhileness of the media experiences they choose to engage in.