Although understanding audience expectations and situational factors is an important component of audience analysis, it is only one of the important steps. You should also consider your audience’s demographics and psychographics. Demographics are the quantifiable social categories of groups of people. Your analysis might identify statistics for audience members’ gender, socioeconomic status (including income, occupation, and education), religious and political affiliations, family status (married, single, divorced, partnered, with children, without children), age, and ethnic background. Other statistics that might be relevant include student enrollment status (full time or part time), student residential status (living on campus or off campus), major area of study, or the geographical regions your fellow students hail from. In addition to understanding their demographic categories, it can be important to analyze your audience’s psychographics, their psychological qualities such as attitudes, values, lifestyles, behaviors, and interests (Kotler & Keller, 2011; Paul, 2001). Marketing researchers are particularly interested in psychographics, as having such information allows them to more effectively market products to specific targets. To learn about people’s psychological profiles, researchers closely monitor Internet traffic, discussions, and trends on social networking sites to see what people think about topics ranging from health and fitness to parenting.

Understanding demographics and psychographics can lead speakers to topics that will be of interest and will carry meaning for specific audiences. For example, one of the most easily quantifiable and useful demographic statistics to consider is the age range of your audience. If you have a good sense of how old most of your audience members are, you’ll be able to choose a topic that is relevant to concerns of their generation and ensure that the examples and anecdotes you use in your speech will resonate with the age groups you are addressing.

As we learned in Chapter 5, some audience characteristics will be more salient—or significant—in some speaking situations than in others. For example, if your audience members are mostly Latina women in their fifties who have survived breast cancer, their status as survivors is not likely to be salient if you are informing them about the importance of maximizing their annual contributions to their 401(k) plans before retiring in the next fifteen years. But if you are persuading a group to contribute money to the American Cancer Society in order to support new research campaigns, their experience fighting cancer should be firmly in your mind as you develop and deliver your speech.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “How can I possibly know all of the demographics and psychographics of my audience members?” You’re right, of course. You can’t necessarily know that the woman who sits three rows back on the left side of the classroom is an engineering major from a Lithuanian, middle-class family with a part-time job who enjoys tending her virtual garden on Farmville and buys organic produce. But you can look for some general traits and trends. For example, most school Web sites make data available on factors like age, race, gender, and religion and often provide information on the percentage of students receiving financial aid, the number of students living on campus versus those who commute, full-time versus part-time students, and so on. You can also pay attention to general opinion polls on your proposed topic or consider the types of topics your classmates discuss in class or on social media sites.

There are some limitations of demographic and psychographic information that deserve mention here. Sometimes speakers—including politicians and advertisers—mistakenly apply stereotypes to demographic groups or overgeneralize about common opinions and beliefs of group members. And, in some cases, the results of demographic and psychographic data collection can be flawed or even downright wrong (Sprague, Stuart, & Bodary, 2010). Because of this, it’s important to be mindful in the way you use this information. For example, your class may be 75 percent Catholic, but that doesn’t automatically mean that they’ll be interested in a speech related to the Church. Additionally, they may not agree with the official positions of the Church (for example, a majority of Catholics favor birth control and a very large percentage of them practice it). That’s why it’s important to anticipate how your particular audience members might respond to your speech—even before you officially choose your topic and conduct your research.