Audience Research: Reception Theory

This was developed by the academic Stuart Hall at Birmingham University in the 1970's and considered how texts were encoded with meaning by producers and then decoded by audiences. The 3 ways an audience could decode it were negotiated, oppositional and dominant.

Firstly dominant meaning is where the audience recognises the meaning and chooses to reject it for cultural, political or idealogical reasons.

Negotiated is where the audience accepts, rejects or refines elements of the text in light of previously held views. Basically neither agreeing or disagreeing or being disinterested.

The final way is Oppositional, this is where the audience recognises the meaning but chooses to completely ignore it or the audience doesn't fully understand the meaning the producer is trying to put across.