Audience research: What the humanistic and the social science approaches could learn from each other

Abstract

The paper starts out with the systematization offered by Jensen and Rosengren (1990), who distinguish between five different (meta)theoretical approaches in audience research. On this basis we raise the question whether audience research as a whole might profit if these different approaches were to pay greater attention to each other. We then elaborate and give reasons for our thesis that in this case the humanistic tradition within audience research should learn from the social science tradition in particular to focus on the act of reception (including its entertaining aspects); complementarily, the humanistic might teach the social science tradition to qualify their hypotheses according to the historical and social context. Finally, we point out metatheoretical and methodological perspectives for further differentiations as well as for overcoming superfluous dichotomies in the field.