Compare methods

	Focus Groups in Media Research	Audience Reception Analysis
Field	Communication	Communication
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1996	1980
Originator	Focus-group tradition (Merton; systematized by Morgan)	Stuart Hall (encoding/decoding); David Morley (empirical reception)
Type	Moderated group discussion to elicit audience meanings and responses	Qualitative study of how audiences interpret and make meaning from media
Seminal source	Morgan, D. L. (1996). Focus groups. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 129–152.	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
Aliases	Media focus groups, Audience focus group method, Group interview for media research, Medya Araştırmalarında Odak Grupları	Reception study, Encoding/decoding analysis, Reception analysis of audiences, İzleyici Alımlama Analizi
Related	4	4
Summary	A focus group is a moderated discussion among a small group of participants, used in media research to explore how audiences interpret, talk about, and respond to media content. Its distinctive value lies in the group interaction itself: participants build on, challenge, and refine one another's views, surfacing shared meanings and contested interpretations that individual interviews or surveys would not reveal.	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.