One commonly used, though controversial, approach to conducting research on media audiences involves ratings analysis. Ratings analysis is the analysis of the audience size and composition data produced by audience measurement firms for use in both the commercial and noncommercial media sectors. Ratings data primarily are used by media outlets and advertisers to determine advertising rates, to ...

Public spaces where culture is co-constructed and performed by a community of people are rich sites for research on identity formation. This thesis explores the poetry slam as a space where poets and audiences co-construct and perform individual and group identities. From a social constructionist approach to identity formation and through the theories and methods of performance studies, the res...