Information on the nationwide project

1. Nationwide Project
ERIN STAVES

2.  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.

3. Morley's methodology involves the showing of two
videotaped Nationwide programmes to 29 groups (510 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).

4. 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

5. 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".

6. 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

7. BBC Survey of Nationwide audience in 1974
Social Group
Size
% of Audience
Upper middle-class
Lower middle-class
Working-class
Male
Female
321,000
2,140,000
3,438,000
2,772,000
3,177,000
5.4
36.3
58.3
46.1
53.9
% of Overall
Population
6.0
24.0
70.0
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