Engagement: The new paradigm for audience research

Audience research remains a fractured discipline and this continues to hinder its development into a fully-fledged academic field. There are many reasons for this – historic, philosophical, structural, epistemological and methodological – that are discussed in the course of this essay. However, one of the benefits of the dispersed nature of the discipline is its flexibility and freedom: audience research is a broad church, attracting a largely itinerant congregation of diverse scholars and practitioners who benefit from the lack of constraints presented by more established disciplines and from the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. On the other hand, the lack of a scholarly home leaves the discipline vulnerable to charges of amorphism, which in turn hamper its structural evolution.

Drawing on an existing body of empirical and theoretical work, this essay argues that the concept of engagement offers a promising paradigm to underpin and inform the maturation of audience research. Following a critical review of competing definitions and application of notions of audience engagement, the essay deconstructs the concept of engagement before reconstructing it to propose a robust and workable new paradigm for audience research.