The ''Nationwide'' Project was an influential media audience research project conducted by the

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, its first director. From 1964 to 2002, it played a critical role in dev ...

at the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

, England, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its principal researchers were David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.

Initial stage

The Media Group at the CCCS selected the

BBC television BBC Television is a service of the BBC. The corporation has operated a Public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, public broadcast television service in the United Kingdom, under the terms of a royal charter, since 1 January 1927. It p ...

current affairs programme '' Nationwide'' to study the encoding/decoding model, a part of

reception theory Reception theory is a version of Reader-response criticism, reader response literary theory that emphasizes each particular reader's reception or interpretation in making meaning from a literary text. Reception theory is generally referred to as a ...

, developed by Stuart Hall. This study was concerned with "the programme's distinctive ideological themes and with the particular ways in which ''Nationwide'' addressed the viewer". This first part of the study was published by Brunsdon and Morley in 1978.

Stage two

Morley conducted

qualitative research Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This ...

with various participants from different educational and occupational backgrounds. He observed different responses to a clip of its

budget A budget is a calculation plan, usually but not always financial plan, financial, for a defined accounting period, period, often one year or a month. A budget may include anticipated sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities including tim ...

special to see whether they would construct dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings (the three categories of readings proposed by Hall). Management groups produced dominant readings, while teacher training students and university arts students produced negotiated readings. Trade union groups characteristically produced oppositional or negotiated readings. Black college students, however, "fail dto engage with the

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...

of the programme enough to reconstruct or redefine it". The initial conclusion was that decodings cannot be traced solely to socioeconomic position, since members of the sample occupying the same class location produced different readings. However, Sujeong Kim's statistical re-analysis of the project's findings suggests that this may be an underinterpretation: according to Kim, the results show that 'audience's social positions ... structure their understandings and evaluations of television programmes in quite consistent directions and patterns.' For example, Kim observes that middle class viewers produced negotiated readings of one particular programme, while working class viewers produced dominant or oppositional readings dependent on their gender and race.

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

*Brunsdon, Charlotte (1978) ''Everyday Television – Nationwide.'' London: BFI. * *Morley, David & Charlotte Brunsdon (1999) ''The Nationwide Television Studies'' London: Routledge. eprint, combining the original two books* *{{cite journal , last=Kim , first=Sujeong , year=2004 , title=Rereading David Morley's The 'Nationwide' Audience , journal=Cultural Studies , volume=18 , number=1 , pages=84–108 , issn= 0950-2386, doi=10.1080/0950238042000181629, s2cid=144510856

External links

David Morley’s Study of the Nationwide Audience (1980)
- notes from the

University of Wales, Aberystwyth Aberystwyth University () is a public research university in Aberystwyth, Wales. Aberystwyth was a founding member institution of the former federal University of Wales. The university has over 8,000 students studying across three academic facul ...

Nationwide