ERIN STAVES

Nationwide Project

The Nationwide Project was an influential media

audience research project conducted by the Centre

for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England,

in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Its principal researchers were David Morley and

Charlotte Brunsdon.

Morley's methodology involves the showing of two videotaped Nationwide programmes to 29

groups (5-10 people) from different social, cultural and educational backgrounds, followed by a group discussion afterwards, working with "the raw data of actual speech instead of trying

to convert responses into immediately categorisable forms" (Morley, 1983).

The Media Group at the CCCS selected the BBC television current affairs programme

Nationwide to study the encoding/decoding model. This study was concerned with "the programme's distinctive ideological themes

and with the particular ways in which Nationwide addressed the viewer". This first part of the study was published by Brunsdon

and Morley in 1978

Morley conducted qualitative research with various participants from different educational and occupational

backgrounds. He observed different responses to a clip of its budget special to see whether they would construct

dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings (the three categories of readings proposed by Hall).

Management groups produced dominant readings, while teacher training students and university arts students

produced negotiated readings. Trade union groups characteristically produced oppositional or negotiated readings. Black college students, however, "fail[ed] to

engage with the discourse of the programme enough to reconstruct or redefine it".

Morley insists that he does not take a social determinist position in which individual 'decodings' of TV programmes are reduced to a direct consequence of social class position

However, Sujeong Kim's statistical re-analysis of the project's findings suggests that this may be an

underinterpretation: according to Kim, the results show that 'audience's social positions ... structure their

understandings and evaluations of television programmes in quite consistent directions and patterns. For example,

Kim observes that middle class viewers produced negotiated readings of one particular programme, while

working class viewers produced dominant or oppositional readings dependent on their gender and race

Social Group Size % of Audience % of Overall Population

Upper middle-class 321,000 5.4 6.0

Lower middle-class 2,140,000 36.3 24.0

Working-class 3,438,000 58.3 70.0 Male 2,772,000 46.1 --------------

Female 3,177,000 53.9 --------------

BBC Survey of Nationwide audience in 1974