COST IS0906
WG 4 – AUDIENCE TRANSFORMATIONS AND SOCIAL INTEGRATION
Authors : Cristina Ponte, Ana Jorge
Institutional affiliation : CIMJ/FCSH – Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL)
Country : Portugal
Email addresses: [email protected]; [email protected]
Key words: Audience Studies; Generations; young people
Portuguese audiences research in Communication Studies:
an overview of the last decade (1999-2010) with a focus on age and generations
In this paper, we wish to provide: 1) an overview of the state of development of the
audience research in Communication Studies, in the last 10 years, based on public
indicators which suggest an absence of research for years; 2) A focus on recent and
ongoing research suggesting that Audiences Studies are becoming active on particular
media audiences/users.
1. Audience research in Communication Studies
In the absence of a centralized database of research in the field, we had to operate
through indexes to build a ten years picture (1999-2009): the research Projects supported
by the national research foundation (FCT); the conferences promoted by the national
association of researchers on Communication (SOPCOM); the books on Communication
published with public funds (GMCS); the Portuguese research on children and the internet
in the EU Kids Online database, etc. We leave out the articles in journals, because we
believe those stem mostly from research Projects and intersect also with presentations.
The first generation of academics in Communications, founded in 1979 with the first
department in New University of Lisbon (UNL), was mostly heir to the French academic
tradition and disciplines connected with Humanities. Their influence is still visible in
Communication departments from other Universities, either public or private. For years,
the scarce empirical research in Communications and Media Studies (Master of Arts and
PhD theses) used mainly content analyses and non-obtrusive methodologies. Journalism
Studies play a major role here: the focus has been overwhelmingly on its importance for
democracy, analyzing news production and contents while research on news publics has
been quite rare (exception of Marisa Silva’s work (2007, 2010) on the readers-writers of
letters to the editors in quality press).
The number of funded Projects focused on or that include audience and reception analysis
is also very low (just 7 in the FCT 58 supported Projects in the 2000s) and they are
coordinated by an even smaller group of researchers (Manuel José Damásio, Universidade
Lusófona; Cristina Ponte, UNL; Sara Pereira, University of Minho and Isabel Ferin Cunha,
University of Coimbra), most of them participating in this COST Action. Besides this list,
there has been research on media education and literacy conducted by Vitor Reia-Baptista
(University of Algarve), who participated in the European Mediappro Project and also by
Manuel Pinto, and Sara Pereira, who have been developing studies on children as TV
audiences since the 1990s. In the Catholic University, Rogério Santos and colleagues have
been surveying public opinion on different topics.
In the 120 books on Communication Studies supported by GMCS since 1999, only six
investigate media reception or include a methodology of reception analysis1. Children and
young people as TV audiences play an important role, accounting for four of those books,
aside readers-writers of letters to the editor and soap opera reception. The main line of
these books is again that of journalism, on the discourses, representation of particular
groups or topics, community of journalists and news making processes; there are also
some historical perspectives of media, public opinion and public sphere.
Since 1999, the national association for Communication Research, SOPCOM, has promoted
conferences on a biannual basis, for some time associated with the Iberian and Brazilian
communities of communication research2. The section of Public Opinion and Audiences
was the one with least sessions and least papers throughout the several editions of the
conference, and even then there is a focus on public sphere theory. The work of Gustavo
Cardoso, Rita Espanha, Nuno Almeida Alves and their colleagues from CIES and OBERCOM,
though, has been the most present in this section, with sociological frameworks and
empirical research mostly based on surveys. The topic of audience is rarely presented in
other sections, such as Multimedia and Audiovisual studies.
An absence of empirical tradition in Communication Studies and a scarce space of
audience research for years is the picture that emerged from above. However, ongoing
research suggests that this picture is being challenged.
Recent and ongoing interdisciplinary research focused on age and generations
In 2008, acknowledging the lack of a systematic study on audiences, the Portuguese
Regulatory Agency for Communication, ERC, commissioned a national study of media
reception in Portugal. The interdisciplinary team was coordinated by José Rebelo, a
sociologist from ISCTE. Besides a national representative survey, the study focused on the
media reception by children, immigrants and the elderly (the last two researched also
through focus groups). The national survey showed clearly that television is the
hegemonic medium, far isolated from the other media, in all age, gender and SES groups,
searched for information, leisure and entertainment purposes. The survey also showed the
SES and the generational gaps in the use of computers and the internet and confirmed the
low penetration of printed media in a country marked by a long history of low levels of
literacy and education.
The Portuguese contribution for the EU Kids Online database on national research on
children and the internet since 2000 (see www.eukidsonline.net) came mostly from
This public policy for supporting the edition of national research on Communication and Media Studies
doesn´t apply however to the translation. As the national market is quite small, the publishers resist paying the
translation; therefore the access to the reference books in the field uses English, Spanish of French languages.
2 The editions analysed start in 2004, since there is no record online of the previous ones.
1
Education and Sociology: 18 PhD and MA theses (pre-Bologna system). Based on the
identification of research gaps, Cristina Ponte, national coordinator of EU Kids Online, is
currently supervising a group of 10 PhD students researching children and young people
as media users and producers (relation with adds, brands and mobile cultures among the
tweens; fan culture and celebrities; youth political participation; uses of the internet and
the influence of peers and parental mediation; digital literacy and personal identity among
others). Two MA theses (Candeias, 2008; Neves, 2008) have already provided qualitative
insights on contexts of digital exclusion among low SES adolescents and on young
children’s skills and literacy to deal with internet risk, respectively.
Combining being a country with an emigrant tradition with the recent arrival of
immigrants, research on migration is also relevant. Besides the work conducted by Ferin,
the research of Carvalheiro (2008), from the Universidade da Beira Interior, is a reference
on the role of the media for the identity processes of migrant young people. Framed within
the Media Studies and the Sociology of Culture and based on in-depth interviews and news
content analyses of French and Portuguese media, the author compared the second
generation of Portuguese living in France with the second generation of Cabo-Verde
migrants living in Portugal, in the ways they consider mass media contents (news and
entertainment) on their distant origins as part of their identity processes.
In 2008-2010, a national study on children using the internet at home and at school noted
the relevance of SES and parental mediation in the families. The study involving a national
sample of more than 3000 children and conducted by the sociologist Ana Nunes de
Almeida (University of Lisbon) was supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation and included
a comparative dimension with Catalonia, Spain. Other national research on children and
the internet conducted by Cardoso, Spain et al (2007, 2009) and funded by the industry
(PT Foundation) also stressed the relevance of the SES differences and schools for
accessing and the emergent bedroom culture.
Based on the identified gaps among generations, in 2009-2011, the research project
‘Digital Inclusion and Integration’, coordinated by Cristina Ponte, Joe Straubhaar (UT
Austin) and José Azevedo (University of Porto) and supported by the UT Austin|Portugal
Program, started researching the relation of families from different social groups (with a
focus on migrants and economically disadvantaged households, as well as on gender, age
and ethnicity) with the media (see https://digital_inclusion.up.pt). The interdisciplinary
research team (Media Studies, Education, Sociology, Psychology and Informational
Sciences) includes senior and junior researchers (PhD students). Aiming at identifying
factors of digital inclusion/exclusion among those populations in a context of social
change, the Project uses theoretical frameworks from Bourdieu (social inequalities, social
and cultural capital, distinction) and generations (Mannheim, Bertaux & Thompson, see
McLoud e Thompson, 2009).The ongoing field work combines surveys with ethnographic
approaches, including interviewing life stories and observation of public spaces such as
libraries.
Audiences transformation and social integration
This brief picture leaves the topics focused by the WP4 group still unattended. However,
there has been other work focused on Europe from the point of view of framing (Horta,
2004; Silveirinha and Ponte, 2006), as well as an extensive work on the public service
media, by researchers from the Minho University (Mediascopio Project), that might
contribute to the needed contextualization. The work on gender and social status starts to
consider age and generations besides children and young people, while the work on media
fandom has been less taken on by national researchers.
Conclusions and perspectives for the future
The need of contextualization of audience research emerges from the comparative
research Projects, paying attention to socio-economic, historical and cultural national
contexts looked from broader landscapes, such as the European context. Attention to
children and young people as media audiences and users has also been integrating
attention to age and generations as research variables. In fact, due to the particular
context of the Portuguese society (experiencing an “unfinished modernity”, as Machado &
Costa point out (1998), and low levels of education and literacy among adults and the
elderly), age, gender, SES and generation emerge as relevant variables for studying media
influence and uses, namely TV and digital media.
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