What affects the ways in which an audience responds?
A number of different factors:- age
- gender
- ethnicity: groups from different cultural backgrounds may have beliefs and values that influence how they respond to a media text.
- social class
- situation: whether you are with family or friends
How are audiences categorized?
A number of different ways:- demographic profiles like age, gender, income, occupation, education
- psychometric profiles (measuring VALS values, attitudes, lifestyle, as devised by
Young and Rubicam, a marketing and communications company, for the advertising industry)
Reader response theory (also called reception theory)
The meaning of a text resides in the reader, not the text :
Audience are active (not passive). They use media to gratify needs:
