Audience Studies in Turkey: From “Uses and Gratifications” to Audience Sociology

This study aims at developing a sociological perspective within the field of audience analysis by critically evaluating the competing paradigms within the research field. In this light, it focuses on key approaches: uses and gratifications, Cultural Studies (encoding/decoding model) and the tradition of reception analysis. The study also presents a general overview of audience studies in Turkey. The article underscores the inadeguacies of essentialist and psychologist accounts of audiences, and suggests a sociological and constructivist approach. This approach tries to locate audiences within wider social and cultural structures and practices, rather than understanding audiences as entities waiting to be discovered by the social scientists. The sociological account of audiences, as further developed in the study, focuses on the role played by the viewing/reading practices in the making of tastes and cultural identities, and problematises the place of these practices in everyday life.