The Nationwide Project was a media audience research study conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the UK. It found that the majority (58.3%) of the television audience belonged to the working class, despite making up only 70% of the overall population. The project also developed the concepts of dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings that audiences can take from media texts based on their social position and values.

1. Jemma Shaw

2. The Nationwide Project was an influential
media audience research project conducted by
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, England,
in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
 Its principal researchers were David Morley and
Charlotte Brunsdon.
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3. Social Group
Size
% of Audience
% of Overall
Population
Upper middleclass
321,000
5.4
6.0
Lower middleclass
2,140,000
36.3
24.0
Working-class
3,438,000
58.3
70.0
Male
2,772,000
46.1
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Female
3,177,000
53.9
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Morley outlined three hypothetical positions, which the reader of a
programme might occupy.
Dominant reading: The reader shares the programme's 'code'
(its meaning system of values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions)
and fully accepts the programme's 'preferred reading„.
Negotiated reading: The reader partly shares the programme's
code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but modifies it in
a way which reflects their position and interests.
Oppositional reading: The reader does not share the
programme's code and rejects the preferred reading, bringing to
bear an alternative frame of interpretation.
Morley argues that 'members of a given sub-culture will tend to
share a cultural orientation towards decoding messages in
particular ways. Their individual "readings" of messages will be
framed by shared cultural formations and practices'

5. 
Morley insists that he does not take a social determinist
position in which individual 'decoding‟s' of TV programmes
are reduced to a direct consequence of social class position.
'It is always a question of how social position, as it is
articulated through particular discourses, produces specific
kinds of readings or decoding's. These readings can then be
seen to be patterned by the way in which the structure of
access to different discourses is determined by social
position'

6. Social Status Classifications
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The social status of a target audience for a magazine has an
impact of the content it offers. Magazines will normally
target audiences from more than one of these categories.
(Eg ABC or C1&2D)
A
higher managerial and professional
B
middle managerial and professional
C1 supervisory, junior management and
professional
C2 skilled manual worker
D
semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
E
pensioners, lower grade workers and the
unemployed.
An example of how to use this in a sentence:
 “The target audience for Vogue Magazine fall into the ABC1
social demographic.”

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Quantative Qualitative Deductive - Deductive research is the type of social research based on
deductive reasoning. Normally, it deals with starting with theories or
generalizations, narrowing them down to hypotheses, and finally testing the
hypothesis.
Reactive Polysemic - the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used
(in different contexts) to express two or more different meanings
Passive - people who listen in order to accomplish other goals.
Active Audience - audience members who already are interested in an
organization, issue, or cause.
Dominant Reading - When a text is read by the audience in a way that is
intended by the creators of the text.
Negotiated Reading - The process of give and take by which members of
the audience interpret, deconstruct and find meaning within a media text.
Oppositional Reading - A critical position that is in opposition to the values
and ideology intended by the creators of a media text, usually the
dominant reading of a text.
Socio/Economic Group - people having the same social, economic, or
educational status
Demographic - Factual characteristics of a population sample, e.g. age,
gender, race, nationality, income, disability, education.