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Cultural research investigates daily experiences, especially through the lenses of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and of imbalances of power and status in society. Such research emphasizes how some groups have been marginalized and ignored throughout history, particularly African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and Asian Americans, Arabic peoples, Latinos, Appalachians, gay men and lesbians, immigrants, and women. Cultural studies researchers also seek to recover these lost or silenced voices. The major approaches they use are textual analysis, audience studies, and political economy studies.

Textual Analysis

Textual analysis entails a close reading and interpretation of cultural messages, including those found in books, movies, and TV programs—such as portrayals of Arab and Arab American characters in popular films.¹³ Whereas social scientific research approaches media messages with the principles of modern science in mind—replicability, objectivity, and data—textual analysis looks at rituals, narratives, and meaning.

Although textual analysis has a long and rich history in film and literary studies, it gained new significance for mass media in 1974 with the publication of Horace Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art, the first academic book to analyze television shows. Newcomb studied why certain TV programs and formats, such as the Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, and Dragnet, became popular. Trained as a literary scholar, Newcomb argued that content analysis and other social science approaches to popular media often ignored artistic traditions and social context.

Before Newcomb’s work, textual analysis focused only on “important” or highly regarded works of art—debates, films, poems, and books. But by the end of the 1970s, a new generation of media studies scholars, who had grown up on television and rock and roll, began studying less elite forms of culture. By shifting the focus to daily popular culture, such studies shone a spotlight on the more ordinary ways that “normal” people (not just military, political, or religious leaders) experience and interpret their daily lives through messages in media.

Audience Studies

Audience studies differ from textual analysis in that the subject being researched is the audience for the text, not the text itself. For example, in her book Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Janice Radway studied a group of midwestern women who enjoyed romance novels. Using her training in literary criticism and employing interviews and questionnaires, Radway investigated the meaning of romance novels to these women. She argued that reading romance novels functions as personal time for some women. The study also suggested that these particular romance-novel fans identified with the active, independent qualities of the romantic heroines they most admired.

As a cultural study, Radway’s work did not claim to be scientific, and her findings cannot be generalized to all women. Rather, Radway investigated and interpreted the relationship between reading popular fiction and ordinary life for a specific group of women.¹⁴ Such studies help to define culture as comprising both the products a society fashions (such as romance novels) and the processes that forge those products (see “Converging Media Case Study: Studying Digital Natives”).

Political Economy Studies

A focus on the production of popular culture and the forces behind it is the topic of political economy studies, which examine interconnections among economic interests, political power, and ways in which that power is used. Major concerns of such studies include the increasing consolidation of media ownership. With this consolidation, the production of media content is being controlled by fewer and fewer organizations, investing those for-profit companies with more and more power to dominate public discourse. The theory is that money—not democratic expression—is now the driving force behind public communication and popular culture.

Political economy studies work best when combined with textual analysis and audience studies to provide fuller context for understanding a media product: the cultural content of the media product, the economics and politics of its production, and audiences’ responses to it.