Audience Research

The expression “audience research” usually refers to the empirical study of media consumption that can be done to serve different purposes.When audience research is conducted to estimate how many members of a target population are viewers or listeners of a TV or radio program or, more generally, the number of users of a media service or product, it relies on the strategies and tools of quantitative social research.Audience research can also be done for quite different purposes, such as to understand how people usemedia in everyday life, to study social and psychological processes ofmedia selection, to understand what kinds of gratification people get frommedia consumption, and so on. Qualitative approaches and tools characterize this kind of audience research fromamethodological point of view.