David Morley & The Nationwide Audience

By Holly Sheldon

The Background to this project

David Morley is a sociologist who specializes in the sociology of television audience. He studied the television programme ‘Nationwide’ which was a popular programme following main national news from London and included human interest stories and showed major events of the day from a ‘down to earth’ perspective. The show had a regular early evening slot from 6pm-7pm on BBC1.

What the study involved…

David Morley conducted the nationwide project in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. He showed one edition of this TV show to a series of different groups that were of a different - gender, race, sexuality or have a different occupation. He asked these different social groups to write down their views on this edition they were shown. He discovered common readings within specific groups.

The conclusion of this project

David Morley concluded that the findings of this study were not strictly applicable to each individual social group, however there are links and members of the same social group are likely to have similar opinions.

David Morley produced this table to show his findings:

Social Group Size % of Audience % of Overall Population

Upper middle - class 321,000 5.4 6.0

Lower middle - class 2,140,000 36.3 24.0

Working class 3,438,000 58.3 70.0

Male 2,772,000 46.1 -----------

Female 3,177,000 53.9 -----------

David Morley conducted 3 ways that the reader of a programme might occupy:1) Dominant Reading – The reader shares the programmes system of beliefs, values

and attitudes.2) Negotiated Reading – The reader partly shares the programmes code, and accepts

the intended reading of the programme to an extent.3) Oppositional Reading – The reader does not share the programme’s code and

reject the preferred reading.

Why is this project important today?

It gets people to think about what other influences make people read a text differently besides the typical social groups. It makes us think about how can we break down audience to understand why audiences see things a certain way.

KEY WORDS:Quantitative – Results being measured by the quantity of something and can be transformed into number, usually more factual than qualitative.

Qualitative - Results being measured by the quality of something, usually more informative about emotions or feelings of others.

Deductive - Reasoning from the general to the particular.

Reactive - Acting in response to a situation rather than creating or controlling it.

Polysemic – A word or phrase that has several different meanings that are all related in some way.

Passive – Accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance.

Active audience – Audience members who are already interested in an organization, issue or cause and instead of waiting to receive information on it, they seek it out from many sources and when doing so, they speak as well as listen.

Dominant - Having power and influence over others.

Negotiated - Solve an issue by bringing about an issue.

Oppositional reading – Holds an opposite stance (neglects) the intended point of view the producer is trying to get across to the viewers’.

Socioeconomic group – Relating to or concerned with the interaction of social and economic factors.

Demographic - A particular movement/specific part of a population.