COST IS0906 WG 4 AUDIENCE TRANSFORMATIONS AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION Author : Miguel Vicente-Mariño Institution affiliation: Universidad de Valladolid Campus de Segovia Country: Spain Email: mvicentem@yahoo.es / miguelvm@soc.uva.es Key words: media, audience research, methods, children, migration, women AUDIENCE RESEARCH IN SPAIN: A BRIEF APPROACH Audience research has traditionally been one of the main fields in the Spanish Communication Sciences, although the accumulation of empirical studies is maybe not as profuse as one can expect. However, theoretical handbooks, formal structure of degrees syllabus and even national research organizations have always included audience research as one of the main topics of knowledge. This short essay presents some of the main findings and contributions to this field during the last decades, evolving from wider approaches on audiences investigation (Grandio, 2007) to concrete results focused on the study of both the social integration and the audience transformation processes. Its content is necessarily limited, so it is not including all the audience research production in Spain, but only some of the more remarkable one to my knowledge. Taking analytical purposes into consideration, three big groups of audience studies can be identified. First, one can find research focused on the explanation about the Spanish audience behavior from institutional and commercial perspectives. These kinds of publications usually rely on the results provided by the main audience measurement companies (TNSofres, Estudio General de Medios, OJD) in order to complete quiteobjective descriptions about media consumption and scheduling strategies. As a key aspect of the media market logic itself, this information is present at the companies decision-making process, at the media discourses and at everyday life in Spain, as audience results have turned into a media agenda soft topic. Scientific scholarly analysis is still scarce in this field, although there are some interesting books (Vaca, 2010, 2009) and articles (Monclús and Vicente-Mariño, 2008; Vicente-Mariño and Monclús, 2008) trying to explain how the Spanish audience behaves in a broader sense. Nevertheless there is a remarkable data production coming from the audience measurement companies (Sofres, 1994-2008) and from consulting research departments (GECA, 1998-2007; Corporación Multimedia; Barlovento Comunicación), being most of them available to the public interest. Second, and walking towards a higher concretion, there is also a big room for studies taking the reception process as the main topic of their approach (Grandío, 2009). It is within this group where more connections with the objectives of this WG4 can be found. Refusing to understand the audience as simple and statistical data, the process of construction of social and individual meanings is the main point of interest. Small groups (families, youth, children, elderly ) became the target for researchers trying to deepen their understanding about the mediated communication process as a whole. Qualitative methods are the main tools to achieve significant results and some of these contributions will be presented below.
And third, there is an established production of theoretical handbooks where audience research is presented as the only topic to be covered, or it becomes an important part of a wider media handbook. On the first group, Jauset (2000, 2008) and Huertas (2002, 2003) are the main authors traditionally devoted to the explanation about the audience research techniques and measurements. It should also be remarked that when it comes to the study of the Spanish audience and their reception attitudes, most of the field work was devoted to television. The quota for newspapers consumption or radio broadcasting is smaller and even for the digital revolution caused by the Internet has not lead to an accurate audience analysis yet. Nevertheless there are some interesting contributions in all these fields (Reinares, 2010) and there is a growing interest in these new media scenes: social networks and the evolution towards a more active public are accessing the research arena, establishing partly the agenda for a near future. In this process, special monographs of scientific journals as TELOS (2010) are interesting route plans, although the audience is not in the core of most of the articles yet. Framing the general Spanish audience Communication scholars have deeply studied the way how the Spanish audience has completed an intense way from a public monopoly system in the early 1980 s to an open competence panorama in first decade of the third millennium. In fact, scientific approaches have usually linked the media offer to the media consumption results, creating a common field where audience and reception studies remain together. In order to get audience results, one will have to search for them in wider works about media (Contreras and Palacio, 2001; Gómez, 2003; Prado, 1992) A rich source of objective data comes from the audience measurement companies, providing the media companies and the society with updated information about the relation established between the citizenship and the media menu. There are also contributions narrowing their analytical scope to concrete channels like Cuatro and La Sexta (Vaca, 2010), formats like reality games (León, 2009), or concrete programs like Operación Triunfo (Cáceres, 2002; Vicente-Mariño and Monclús, 2009), Gran Hermano (Cáceres, 2001) or TV US series (Tous, 2010). Nevertheless, even in this field -usually kept away from the public and scholar discussion, as it works mainly with statistical and objective data-, the Spanish researchers can bring more light to understand the main lines of their media system. Audience results from radio, press or internet are still waiting for a deeper development. Integration of social collectives as a research topic The Spanish societies have changed a lot during the last three decades, and so did the media structure. Nevertheless, it has been agreed that this offer explosion has not lead to a higher pluralism on media content. So Spain media are facing an ethnic and cultural diverse audience, but the media content seems to keep on following a similar path as in the past. Scholars have presented this contradiction and have provided useful examples of good and bad practices in the field of social transformation as a result of media action. Our focus will be now displayed on three different collectives sharing common social goals. Children and Media Lining up with a solid international tradition, children and teenagers are one of the more privileged age group in social research. The media effects on the social meaning
construction by those who are building up their lives counts with a dominant presences in scientific journals as ZER. Always in the crossroad with sociology, this age is also carefully analyzed by other journals devoted specifically to Youth studies, such as Revista de Estudios de Juventud (2010). Suggesting considerations about the methodological concerns raised when researching this collective have been treated by Callejo (2010), or by García de Cortázar et al. (1998). Media education field in Spain counts with some solid researchers and their studies about the children and youth media reception process are completing one of the more interesting fields. Migration and cultural relations The arrival of workers coming from Latin American, Eastern European and African countries to Spain is one of the salient changes encountered in Spain. After a long tradition of Spaniards moving to Central Europe and Latin America during the 20 th century, Spain turned into a reception country. Media has always been considered as a useful strategy to integrate these new collectives and to reduce to the minimum quota the potential conflicts about national identities. Castelló (2006); Martínez (2009); López et al. (2010); León y García (2002) have analyzed diverse aspects from both the media representation and reception processes. Women Studies The portrayal of women in contemporary media is a traditional topic of study, but paradoxically there is not a similar quantity of studies about the female audiences and the comparisons to the male gender. Del Hoyo and Berganza (2006), García and Martínez (2009) have studied the media portrayal of women in diverse media, from press to audiovisual. Nevertheless approaches to audience studies are not completing the deep analysis of the mediated representation of this collective, unless punctual studies like the one carried out by Garcia and Martínez (2008). Some conclusions The Spanish audience research landscape is mainly still in progress, but the current consolidation of Communication Sciences all over the country is a solid starting point for the future. Trying to synthesize, a brief list of headlines are provided: Qualitative approaches are clearly dominant, whilst the quantitative studies are too much limited to the consumption description, without going beyond the presentation of the main trends on media consumption. TV is still the main reference. Although Internet is accessing the field with strong energy, its impulse is not enough to replace the TV from the researchers methodological designs. The room for imbrications with other research traditions is still to be explored, but potentialities are easily visible. There is a lack of connection with media production or media economy studies that could benefit audience research, following a similar strategy as the one mixing audience and textual analysis or cultural studies. There is a clear absence of experimental research (Alcolea, 2008). This trend is common to the Spanish Communication Research field. Although it cannot be the more convenient research method for audience research, it has also some things to contribute with.
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