Audience research can be divided into three kinds: commercial, academic and public. As the results of the commercial research are very selectively made public and much of the research process remains hidden, this paper confines its attention to the other two categories. Mainly devoted to theoretical and methodological issues, the academic research can be followed with relative ease in academic publications. Public research, however, is a much more mixed category, which has mainly been confined to countries with strong public policy for media, such as Sweden, Holland, the UK or Germany.

Distinctive Features of European Situation

Although largely based on more developed American practice in the middle of the last century, audience research in Europe has its different agenda of research issues due to the following distinctive features of the European situation:

More qualitative and interpretative research has been used in Europe to measure audience use behavior.

1. Diversity of structure and culture in Europe has led to differences in media use patterns, styles and formats of media as well as in research traditions;

2. The public media sector remains strong, especially in the shape of public service broadcasting;

3. Politicized in varying degrees, the press in most European countries enjoy some privileges and protection from public policy and ideas about the diversity and in dependence of the press have been influential in defining issues and leading to some research;

4. As far as media are concerned, both politics and cultural policy are more salient in Europe than in the USA. European countries generally wish to promote their media production and presence in the global media market and to ensure that their audiences are not too dependent on media imports from the USA for reasons of cultural integrity.

Main Themes for European Audience Research

The agenda of research issues for European audience research includes media use, television news research, popular culture, media quality, special audiences, audience aspects of effect research, new electronic media, and resistance to cultural invasion.

Specifically, more qualitative and interpretative research has been used to measure audience use behavior. In addition, the concept of "lifestyle" has been revived and the appearance of new media has challenged the stability of older patterns. In Europe, academic interest has revived in television news studies, stimulated in part by the competitive pressures mentioned above and also by the key role that television news still plays in political life. Another major theme for audience research is that much attention has been given to audience experience with (audio-visual) popular culture, with particular reference to the soap opera genre and to sub-cultural variables, such as gender.

As far as media quality is concerned, two main aspects have received attention in audience research. The first one is the possibility and value of having quality or appreciation ratings of programmes. The second one is the norms and expectations applied by the public to television in matters such as morality, decency, political balance, diversity and fairness. As to special audiences, they include child audience, immigrant minorities and many minor sub-national languages that still survive in present-day Europe.

European audience research is also concerned with the audience aspects of effect research. It is impossible to do effect research without also doing audience research and thus impossible to separate the two. The output of effect research as such is limited and irregular, due in part of the devaluation of earlier media impact models, but examples of audience research can be found in respect of political communication and the socialization of the young.

As elsewhere, the new electronic media have also challenged audience research. There is intense interest in the potential audience for new media(especially the Internet) In fact, the amount of research into this topic is still limited, partly due to the relatively low or uneven rate of diffusion of certain new technologies( including cable)In much of Europe, the Internet is held up by barriers of language( The global internet is largely in English)It is hard to do audience research without an audience or when the early audience is almost certainly very untypical of the eventual audience and even the medium itself will change greatly.

Out of the concern about the "Americanization" of the media in Europe, research has been stimulated both into the pattern of choices as between local (or European) film and programme content and imported (mainly US-made) content. The popularity of American popular culture is a long-established fact, but it is less well known whether it has any cultural consequences or in what respects it can be substituted for by domestic media production.

Shifting Theoretical Frames

Following the changes in media and society, the fundamental concerns that underlie audience research are gradually changing in Europe. Along with that change are the theoretical frameworks. They include the shift from sender- to audience-centered research approaches, from behavioral to social cultural perspective. These shifts have led to a concept of "audiencehood" as an aspect of everyday life constructed in

The emergence of new media has challenged traditional audience research.

various ways, with various meaning and valuations by various more or less homogeneous sub-groups (see Alasuutari, 1999 ) The shifts also have brought about an idea of "interpretative community", a quasi-group sharing certain life experiences and a set of understandings of the many latent meanings of engaging with the media, as well as the meaning of particular genres.

The theoretical frameworks that have guided the audience research in Europe include the structural framework, reception analysis and social action theory. The structural framework constitutes a variety of geographical locations, economic factors, social-cultural factors and demographic factors. The reception analysis refers to analyzing practices of media use in relation to the particular content, social context and experience of a sub-cultural group by employing ethnographic and interpretative methods. According to the social action theory, media choice and attention is a form of social action or as a form of problem solving by people in a given social environment according to their "life world" and past experience.

The above-described shifting theoretical frameworks have been employed in the following research areas: news and the audience, soap operas and popular culture, the Americanization of media culture as viewed from the audience, patterns of media use, critical and accountability research.

Future Directions

Most of the themes and issues outlined above are likely to remain on the agenda of research. With the increasing overlapping of content and ownership, the tradition notion of an audience more or less clearly located in space and time is called into question. Although theory and research have to adapt to the changes brought about by the developments in digitalization and the Internet, the established theories and research methodologies will remain relevant.

 ■ Denis McQuail
Professor, Amsterdam School of
Communication Research, Holland
(Abstract from a Presentation at International Conference
on Chinese Audiences Across Time and Space,
organized by City University of Hong Kong on April 1-2, 2000)