Despite their revolutionary views on empirical audience research, the movement lead by theorists such as Ang and Morley were not without their critics. It was argued that Ang’s faith in qualitative research was largely unjustified because she had been too critical of previous media research involving quantitative methods. Ang was also criticized for the holes in her methodology when writing “Watching Dallas”. For example, her sampling method, in which she advertised in a woman’s magazine posing the question;
‘I like watching the TV series Dallas but get odd reactions to it, would anyone like to write and tell me why you like, or dislike it? I should like to assimilate these reactions into my university thesis.’
There were several issues with this sampling method. As it was targeted specifically at a female audience; the number of female responses to the advert outnumbered the males tenfold. This showed a clear bias in the accessibility of the experiment to men, it was therefore decided that any conclusions drawn from Ang’s research would be invalid, as it was not representative of the whole demographic of “Dallas”.
This criticism shows Ang in a somewhat hypocritical light. It has been said that the “active” audience research movement lacked certain methological validities. Criticisms aside, it cannot be denied that Ang and the movement towards empirical audience research have been revolutionary, if not misguided, in the field of media and mass cultural research. More recent methological theories have shifted to an equal balance of quantitative and qualitative research methods, such as the example of Schlesinger, Dobash, Dobash and Weaver, (1992) mentioned before.
References:
Livingstone, S (1993) "The rise and fall of audience research: an old story with a new ending", LSE Research online.
Miller, J (2010) "Review of introduction to Ien Ang's watching Dallas", Wordpress
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