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Five Traditions in Search of the Audience 67

humanistic scholarship – at much the same pace as social science learns and
re-learns humanistic techniques of textual analysis and interpretation, criticism
of sources, etc. The development of systematic modes of analysis is thus being
undertaken from several quarters of the field (Höijer, 1989, 1990; Jensen, 1989;
Kirk and Miller, 1986). [...]
In such co-operation, it is crucial that the standards of what constitutes scien-
tific and scholarly acceptable analysis be made explicit. Humanistic researchers
need to establish a terminology which will enable them to deal with issues of
reliability, validity and generalizability (Höijer, 1989, 1990). Social science research,
equally, needs to recognize that non-quantitative procedures of analysis, as
developed within linguistics and semiotics in the course of this century, may
well have an explanatory value in their own right (e.g. Van Dijk, 1988).
We believe that comparative studies across cultures would lend themselves
very well to further developments in multi-method empirical research. As sug-
gested by ethnographies both within anthropology and in recent media research
(Lull, 1988), various forms of in-depth, naturalistic observation and interaction
with audience respondents may be necessary in order to characterize and
delimit the context of data gathering. At the same time, survey techniques may
be used to examine particular issues which emerge in the course of the study,
specifying in turn, the purposes of further observation or interviewing and pro-
viding an opportunity to assess comparatively two sets of findings regarding
the same object of study. Contributing to an important and relatively under-
researched area of international communication research, such studies would fit
the recent strong trend towards an increased interest in comparative studies in
communication. They would also be able to explore the extent to which current
research methodologies, most of which embody a specific form of western ratio-
nality, apply to the reception and impact of media across cultures (cf. Liebes and
Katz, 1986; Lull, 1988).
Third, audience research may return to community studies, as carried out by
some early work in the field, in order to assess the explanatory value of different
traditions (Lynd and Lynd, 1929; cf. Caplow and Bahr, 1983). Case studies of
the cultural and communicative practices of specific communities represent an
opportunity to examine in detail the kinds of micro and macro social contexts in
which most media use takes place. Case studies also lend themselves specifically
to the combination of several modes of empirical analysis. They thus offer excel-
lent opportunities to complement the limitations naturally inherent in each and
every single research tradition.
In the long term, of course, the combined approaches suggested above must
in their turn be combined. In comparative studies based on the combination of
several methodologies we may at last find the audience.

References

Adorno, T.W. and M. Horkheimer (1977) ‘The Culture Industry’, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and
J. Woollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society. London: Edward Arnold.
Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas. London: Methuen.