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A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Domestic and US Fiction 75

On technical and production aspects both fiction programmes differed quite a
lot, where the American sitcom was technically the ‘better’ product (for instance,
the average shot length was considerably longer for the Flemish sitcom).

Respondents

In our case study both fiction programmes were shown to thirty-four respondents
(seventeen women, seventeen men) in their homes with their families. This group
could be subdivided into three major groups: younger adolescents (16 to 18 years
old), younger adults (21 to 30 years old) and older adults (45 to 55 years old).

Data Collection

Methodologically this case study was designed as a multi-method piece of
research, combining several techniques used in recent reception analyses. The
data collection process consisted of three phases. Several days before the view-
ing sessions the respondents were asked to fill in a general questionnaire, that
was designed to discover personal attitudes and opinions about situation comedy
as a genre and about US television fiction and domestic drama on Flemish televi-
sion (1: general questionnaire phase). The viewing sessions of both programmes
were each time followed by individual open interviews, aimed to tap each
respondent’s experience of the programme (2: interview phase). After this session,
another questionnaire booklet was given to each respondent. In this phase of the
study the respondents were asked to attribute values for specific characteristics
to six main characters in both sitcoms, using scaling techniques (Livingstone,
1987, 1988, 1989) (3: scaling phase).

Data Analysis

On an analytical level this combined use of multiple qualitative and quantitative
data collection techniques was not only inspired by questions of reliability
(Höijer, 1990a, 1990b; Jensen and Rosengren, 1990), but especially by the need to
understand the reception of audiovisual programmes as a process. As has been
rightly remarked by James Curran (1990: 150) many recent ethnographic studies
on audiences have used notions of reception and, especially, decoding as plain,
‘loose’ concepts. Following Curran we could say that some practitioners of qual-
itative audience research seem to have forgotten that different methods of data
collection also produce different types of information. Interviewing people, for
example, produces totally different data than asking them to attribute values to
specific characters, using scaling techniques.
In this sense, to have a better insight into reception as a process, the concept
has for analytical reasons to be broken up into different substantial parts, which