Compare methods

	Audience Reception Analysis	Uses and Gratifications Survey
Field	Communication	Communication
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1980	1973
Originator	Stuart Hall (encoding/decoding); David Morley (empirical reception)	Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler & Michael Gurevitch
Type	Qualitative study of how audiences interpret and make meaning from media	Audience-centered survey approach to media motivations and rewards
Seminal source	Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson. ISBN: 9780415079068	Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509–523.
Aliases	Reception study, Encoding/decoding analysis, Reception analysis of audiences, İzleyici Alımlama Analizi	U&G survey, Gratifications sought and obtained survey, Media gratifications measurement, Kullanımlar ve Doyumlar Anketi
Related	4	4
Summary	Audience reception analysis studies how real audiences interpret and make meaning from media texts, rejecting the idea that meaning is simply transmitted from message to receiver. Built on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model and David Morley's empirical work, it treats interpretation as an active, socially situated process and examines whether audiences accept, negotiate, or resist the meanings a text seems to prefer.	The uses and gratifications survey is the dominant audience-centered method in communication research, asking not what media do to people but what people do with media. Codified by Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch in 1973, it treats audiences as active agents who select media to satisfy social and psychological needs, and it measures those motives and the rewards obtained through structured self-report scales.