Understanding Audiences: Involvements and Expectations - An Analysis, Lecture notes of Communication

Download Understanding Audiences: Involvements and Expectations - An Analysis and more Lecture notes Communication in PDF only on Docsity! 74E Chapter 5 UNDERSTANDING AUDIENCES: INVOLVEMENTS AND EXPECTATIONS Revised Spring 2008 The impulse to speak usually springs from some purpose you hope to accomplish: changing a specific belief, modifying a behavior, encouraging the audience to be more receptive to a new idea, and so forth. Whatever your goal, the audience must actively participate in the communication process if you are to be successful. To do this, they must understand your information, follow your reasoning, and be willing to consider your theme before you can accomplish your goal. Because the characteristics of your audience play a critical role in the communication process, some of your planning time should be dedicated to understanding the people you will be aiming your message toward. What do they already know? What beliefs do they share? How do they feel about issues and policies relevant to your topic? These things are important because your message should be adapted to the audience you actually face, and not to some abstract, ideal, or universal audience you would like to address. Furthermore, audiences are never passively “stimulated” into “responding” as you would like them to. Even if your audience appears to be quietly attending to your message, their minds are also abuzz with their own thoughts—considering your message, disputing your arguments, and even daydreaming about being elsewhere. But, above all else, they are filtering your message through the interpretive frame they have spent a lifetime constructing. As a speaker, then, you control only what content is sent in your message; your audience determines what they will take away and incorporate in developing their understanding of your topic. You cannot make your audience understand, believe, or appreciate anything without their willingness to participate. Accordingly, all you can reasonably do is construct the best message you can, taking into account everything you know about your audience, and adapting your form and content to whatever information you have gathered about them. Analyzing Audiences 5-2 The purpose of this area of the public speaking website, then, is to introduce the problem of audience analysis, to present some factors you should consider as you think about the people with whom you are communicating, and to recommend some things you can do to find out more about your audience. Armed with adequate information, you can adapt your message content, organizational structure, delivery, and language to take advantage of the forces already at work in your audience’s mind. THE NATURE OF AUDIENCE ANALYSIS Audience analysis requires you to assess how the audience is likely to interpret the information that is relevant to the success of your message. This may sound like an abstract and difficult task—too daunting to be taken seriously. However, this is precisely the task you routinely accomplish every time you have a conversation with a friend, relative, or stranger. To see how much audience analysis you already perform as you communicate during a typical day, let’s explore a commonplace situation in which a person like yourself spontaneously evaluates an audience and adapts to it. In the scenario below, notice the many different ways the same person answers the same basic question, depending upon who’s asking it. It’s the end of a typical fall semester and Mr. Chan is headed home on the MTR for a well-deserved vacation. To welcome him, Mr. Chan’s parents have invited a few of his relatives over for a big family dinner. Mr. Chan steps out of the elevator just in time to meet his father, who is on his way to get some last-minute groceries. After a preliminary “Welcome home” and “How are you?” Mr. Chan’s father inquires, “How’s school?” “Not bad,” Mr. Chan replies, a little tiredly. After all, it’s been a long ride from the residence hall out to Tuen Mun and his father will understand. “But I’ll sure be glad when May gets here and I can get a full-time job. It will be nice to get away from the books and earn some money for a while.” Next Mr. Chan pops his head into the kitchen to find his mother. “Well, helllllOoooooo there,” she says. “Glad to have you have back home. How’s school?” “Just great,” Mr. Chan enthuses. “Couldn’t be better. I’ve been working hard, my grades are up (I got an A in my speech class), and I’ve attended all my classes. Yeah. Things are going just great. Since dinner’s not ready yet, and none of the guests have arrived, Mr. Chan changes clothes and goes over to his best friend’s house. On the way, Mr. Chan meets the kid who used to idolize him when he was in high school. “How’s school?” the kid asks. “Terrific,” Mr. Chan answers, summoning up his most heroic voice. “The social life is great. There’s the Chicken Oil Company for a drink with the guys on Monday, Duddley’s Draw on Tuesday, the University Movie on Wednesday (for culture, you know), the Lakeview Dance Club on Thursday, and best of all, on Friday night, there’s the Dixie Chicken. If I’m bored on Saturday, I can go to the game. College sure is a lot of fun!” Finally, when Mr. Chan gets to his friend’s house, his friend wonders, “How’s school?” Analyzing Audiences 5-3 “Really rough, this semester. You see, I’ve just started dating this new girl, and, uh, well, you know, we spend a lot of time together. And it may get serious. And I . . . I just don’t know what to do. I didn’t really want to come home this time. And, besides . . . she’s kind of the serious type—spends a lot of time in the library studying, and, well, I’ve spent more time in the library this past few weeks than in all the rest of my time at school put together. My grades have come up, but I haven’t been dancing at the club in weeks!” In every case Mr. Chan was asked the same question, “How’s school?” And in every case he gave a different answer. Moreover, had we followed Mr. Chan back to the party, Uncle Wing, Aunt Mei, and Cousin Ling might each have been treated to still different answers. What’s going on here? Is it that Mr. Chan is basically dishonest? Is it that he really doesn’t know how school is? Which is the real and honest answer to the question, “How’s school?” The truth is, of course, these are all honest answers to the question. For, at one time or another, school is all of those wonderful, social, distressing, hard-working, confusing things Mr. Chan mentioned in his various conversations. Why then all the different answers? Mr. Chan was adapting spontaneously to his audience. Because there is simply no way Mr. Chan could ever communicate in a single conversation everything he knows or feels or believes about a subject as complex as “school,” he spontaneously selected from his wealth of ideas the ones he thought each person (his immediate audience) would be most interested in hearing about. Given the audience’s personal history with him, and anything else he thought would be relevant on this occasion, Mr. Chan constructed his answer. Other things he simply omitted as unnecessary at this time. You do this kind of audience analysis and adaptation all the time yourself, so it is neither an abstract nor a difficult task. Now let us look at it more closely. AUDIENCE ANALYSIS may be defined as the process of discovering the features of your target audience that help to determine your audience’s possible responses to the form and content of your messages. These factors might include the audience’s prior knowledge about your topic, their general level of interest concerning things related to your topic, and their positive or negative feelings relative to your topic. As such, audience analysis is the process of trying to construct a coherent picture of your audience—a picture that has implications for how you shape and present your message. Although audience analysis for public messages is a somewhat larger and more self-conscious task than you would do for interpersonal communication, the general principle of audience analysis and adaptation is the same one you’ve been operating on for years: You select what you are going to say and how you are going to say it based on your best evaluation of your audience's prior knowledge and opinions concerning the topic. However, spontaneous audience analysis differs from the self-conscious audience analysis used by professional communicators in one important way. In the spontaneous audience analysis Mr. Chan used during his conversations, his focus was upon what is unique about the other person as an individual. Factors that distinguished his father, mother, neighbor, friend, aunt, uncle, and cousin from one another determined what he said to each of them individually. Analyzing Audiences 5-4 In contrast, in the highly-conscious audience analysis performed for public communication, you will focus upon what audience members as a group may have in common. This is because you are sending your message to all of them simultaneously. Accordingly, it is the process of exploring what audience members are likely to have in common that will be the focus of this section. For once you know that, you will be better able to (a) target the message to the audience’s actual, collective need for information, and (b) take fullest advantage of any possible bridges from the knowledge that forms their current beliefs and behaviors to the new information or arguments you plan to present. FOUNDATIONS OF AUDIENCE ANALYSIS From birth, every member of your target audience has been building up an understanding of how the world works and formulating that understanding into a structure of symbols (usually words and propositions) that helps them shape their understanding into a relatively enduring framework of ideas. Consequently, as adults we tend to have a symbolically encoded and relatively enduring understanding of how reality works in all of its aspects. In one sense, then, we are all unique, and audience analysis would seem to be a hopeless folly. For every individual would seem to be building up a unique and personal understanding of the way things tend to work. However, because of communication, that is not the way things actually turn out. Through communication we share our personal visions with one another, and this gives us a chance to check those versions of reality with one another, and to modify them based on others’ experience if we choose. In this way, people who communicate with one another can come to share quite similar overall interpretations of things (Bormann, 1985). This process began at birth (some say before), when your parents talked to you while feeding, clothing, and bathing you. All of that “conversation” used the vocabulary of your parents’ speech community, and projected the broadest and most fundamental features of the version of reality your parents accepted at the time they were doing this talk. This talk included the way they classified and labeled the objects and processes you experienced (Brown, 1970); the terms of address they used in greeting you and others (Frank & Anshen, 1983); the degree of closeness or “immediacy” they attributed to various objects and persons (Wiener & Mehrabian, 1968); the metaphors and comparisons they used to explain the world to you (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980); the values they formulated through various labels (Rosenthal, 1984); the attitudes toward others they communicated (van Dijk, 1987); the stories they told about your family, its deeds, and the meaning of various individuals’ accomplishments (Stone, 1988); and the accounts they gave for various successes, failures, decisions, and actions in their lives (Harvey, Weber & Orbuch, 1990; Riessman, 1990). Through all of this communication, you became socialized into a personalized version of the reality your parents had accepted—personalized because your vision has been modified from the beginning by your own experiences and by conversations with other people who may have visited your home. The process continued as you matured and interacted with people far beyond your immediate family. And it continues today. You are constantly transforming your new experiences into new ideas and beliefs that remodel your older understanding of various aspects of your social world. Then, you use your remodeled understanding as the basis for future actions, judgments and interpretations because the construction and remodeling cycle continues through your life. The older you Analyzing Audiences 5-9 traditionally masculine job or social role may be fulfilled by women (mailman, policeman, chairman, and so forth) are unacceptable today; likewise, feminine noun endings emphasizing that a traditionally masculine role is being fulfilled by a women (poetess, postmistress, aviatrix) are all equally unacceptable. To use gender-discriminating language when sex is not germane simply risks alienating part of your audience. Beyond such suggestions, however, the best one can say is to be aware of how your topic, purpose, organization, supporting material, visual imagery, delivery, and so forth, might affect the men and women in your audience—all of whom, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are part of a large movement that is restructuring our view of ourselves and one another. Age-Based Demographic Involvements When most readers of this website get out of school, they will be 21-22 years old—born after 1980. For many of the messages you will be called on to prepare as you begin your professional career, most of your target audience will have been born long before that and will have experienced things directly that you can only have read about as “ancient history.” They simply will have different experiences from you and will probably know vastly more than you do about many of the things you will be trying to talk to them about. How can you possibly connect with them? As people grow older they change in many predictable ways physically, emotionally, socially. For example, the ancient riddle of the Sphinx acknowledges this in its question: “What is it that goes on four legs when it is young, two legs when it is mature, and on three lets when it is old?” The answer is, of course, humans—who crawl on all fours as children, walk upright on two legs during the middle years of life, and use the support of a cane in old age. Such physical changes are fairly predictable and can be taken into account as you prepare your message. But we change psychologically as well as physically during the course of our lives. Gail Sheehy’s (1976) classic book Passages is only one among many works to note the predictable changes we undergo. And Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old description of the phases of a person’s life rings as true today as the day it was written. For example, he comments, that the “youthful type of character [has]…strong passions and tends to gratify them indiscriminately.” Many a contemporary parent has thought the very same thing. Let us now look at two dimensions related to the relative age of an audience that you can consider in planning your messages: life stages and generational knowledge. Life Stages Because it is possible to predict to some extent the phases through which people pass as they go through life, it is also possible to devise age “bands” which group people together into the likely stages of life they are experiencing at certain ages. As shown in Figure 5-2, we can identify eight rough bands ranging between birth and ripe old age. While the numbers are somewhat arbitrary, they tend to correspond with the kinds of things that are mostly likely going on at those ages. Analyzing Audiences 5-10 Figure 5-2. Age bands can help you identify the major interests that characterize your audience’s stage in life. For example, the years between birth and six are typically the preschool years, when the child is still at home or in day care, and still quite dependent upon adults for meeting its immediate needs. The period from 7-12 corresponds to the elementary school years, when there is typically a rising sense of the self as an individual and a greater importance placed on freedom and independence. During this period, the child begins to be given some choice about family spending and, therefore, begins to become an independent economic factor for advertisers of goods and services. During the 13 to 17 age bracket the child enters adolescence, where their sexuality first emerges. At this time issues related to dating become important, and personal attention to how one looks develops rapidly. Moreover, during this period the individual’s long-term interests are rapidly evolving. By the 18-22 period, the individual is beginning to think about long term career prospects, pairing up for family purposes, completing their formal education if they go to university, and so forth. The long period between 23-35 is when families are usually launched and children are born. So issues related to rearing a family come to the fore. By the time the person enters the 36 to 55 period, the children are usually already in school and, perhaps, even already adults themselves. So this period is often characterized by major changes in life direction (sometimes simply called the mid-life crisis), where the adult is still strong and healthy and is also financially secure enough to travel or try new things without the same family pressures that characterized the previous life stage. After 55, with the family grown and the empty nest typically a reality, the individual must consider “what to do with the rest of my life.” The body usually slows down and health problems gradually increase. So there are new realities to deal with. In the final stage of life, the individual has usually retired from the formal workplace and has more leisure time at home. The body begins to deteriorate more rapidly, with a greater number or severity of illnesses to try to overcome. There are also grandchildren to attend to and issues related to the meaning of one’s life typically must be confronted. Much more could be said about the phases of life and their possible impact on how one tailors one’s messages for various age groups. The most important thing to remember, however, is that it is possible anticipate the kinds of experiences various age-banded segments of your audience will be having and to adapt your messages to those likely experiences. Generational Knowledge and Experiences In addition to the individual psychological changes that arise because of the personal aging process, there are generational changes that apply to most persons of the same age, as generations of age-mates go through life together. This means that people of the same relative age tend to share certain unifying social experiences that characterize the decades in which they grew up. For example, the generation growing up in America in the 1930s is bound together by experiences of the Great Depression; those growing up in the 1940s are bound together by their experience of World War II. The 1950s generation is involved together by their experience of such things as the Korean War and the early days of television—with its introduction of the great TV comedians and programs like “The Mickey Mouse Club” and “Leave it to Beaver.” Also affecting this generation are Analyzing Audiences 5-11 memories of the McCarthy hearings, the cold war, Sputnik, and the birth of rock and roll. The 1960s generation was forever bound together by the war in Vietnam, social activism, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rise of the Beatles. More recently, the generation of the 1970s will probably forever be involved together because of the Watergate hearings, the resignation of a president, and a crisis of faith in American political values. The 1980s generation will probably be characterized by yuppies, the candidacies of the first woman and first black for a national office, by the rise of the computer era, Nintendo and other video games, AIDS, and the influence of CNN (the Cable News Network) on world events. The 1990s saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the shrinking of the American dream in the early years and its re-expansion during most of the Clinton era, talk of a trade war with Japan, numerous “Buy American” movements in various industries, a crisis in health care availability, the rise of sexual harassment as a grave social issue, and economically fueled race riots. The first decade of 21st century has already seen the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Towers, major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suicide bombings in Israel and Russia, and the like. As you can see, knowing the relative age of your audience—at least in relation to such age-specific, generationally involving experiences as those listed here—should give you many ideas for how to relate the subject of your own contemporary messages to the shared experiences of your audience as generational age mates who have constructed their understanding of things by taking such broad issues into account. Socioeconomic Class Having enough money to feel comfortable makes a difference in one’s outlook on a wide variety of social and political issues that speakers become involved in. So it is important to assess your audience’s involvements based on the socioeconomic factors that link your message to their lives. Because public speaking frequently concerns public policy issues, the appeals one uses are potentially quite different as the socioeconomic levels of the audience changes. Accordingly, you must vary the appeals and examples you use. Sociologists are able to distinguish numerous socioeconomic gradations in our population; but even as rough a set of levels as lower, middle, and upper may be of some help as you adapt your message to the ears you most want to reach. Educational Level A college education not only entails a body of academic knowledge but also a particular way of thinking and valuing things. Typically, those people going to college may be expected to value such things as “being educated” and “getting ahead.” But the involvements among college-educated people may go even deeper. Sociolinguist William Labov has even found that college-educated people tell stories about life-threatening events in a very different way from those who had a high school education or less. It is not that each group merely had different stories to tell, but that the entire structure of the story was different. According to Labov (1983), college-educated persons told their stories from an impersonal and analytical distance. Furthermore, they evaluated the feelings they experienced during the incident at the same time as they retold the events. In contrast, the people with less than a college education tended to recreate the incidents in the ongoing Analyzing Audiences 5-12 present, dramatizing the story almost as if they were currently reliving it. Thus, whatever its liberating, individuating influences on our general thinking ability, a college education also involves us with all those others who are college educated and makes us more alike in certain important ways. To know the general educational level of your audience is also to have a better idea about what kinds of supporting material might help your speech’s success. The more highly educated your audience, the more likely they will understand technical vocabulary and be able to follow sophisticated reasoning. Such an audience is also more able to entertain counterfactual speculation such as, “If the Soviets had landed on the moon first, what might have been the implications for the subsequent development of our own space program?” (Bloom, 1981). Accordingly, try to determine the general educational level of your audience so that you can determine the level at which you may safely pitch your speech. THE LAYERS OF DEMOGRAPHIC INVOLVEMENTS Figure 5-3 illustrates the point that these four demographic factors can be seen as developing in layers of information that refine your understanding of the audience you are addressing. Thus, the target audience may be composed primarily of women (the first layer), who are of child bearing age (layer two), who are on the lower end of the socio- economic scale (layer three), and who have less that a high school education (the fourth layer). Knowing these things allows you to better pinpoint your target audience’s needs for information and the kinds of information and imagery that might appeal to them as you develop your message. Figure 5-3. An audience’s demographic involvements can be seen as building up in layers, with each higher layer modifying the general characteristics of the layer below it. Analyzing Audiences 5-13 SOCIAL INVOLVEMENTS People tend to become more similar to those with whom they fraternize frequently than to those with whom they have little or only occasional social contact. Social contact typically breeds shared involvements in basic beliefs, interests, and experiences—as people construct congruent viewpoints through their mutual communication (Sherif & Sherif, 1964). Unlike demographic involvements, which are based primarily on the accidents of one’s birth—when one was born (age), whether one has an XX or an XY chromosome pattern (sex)—social involvements are determined by the choices one makes concerning whom to spend time with. Social involvements are not as broad and general as are demographic involvements, but they are equally important for you to adapt your message to. Anything you can discover about your audience that distinguishes them from the general demographic involvements they may share with many audiences is a potential source for individualizing your message for them in particular. Some of the social involvements you may wish to consider as you prepare your message include the following: place and type of employment, club and organizational memberships, and religious affiliations. Employment-Based Involvements: Place and Type The terms white collar worker and blue collar worker are familiar descriptions of the kind of work people do, and we can easily imagine the general type of person with whom we associate each label. We can also imagine the values we presume people under each label may share. The type of work we choose (or fall into) is both a reflection of who we are and a major influence upon who we will eventually become as we grow older. Because the involvements we develop at work have an influence on our beliefs, attitudes, interests, and values, it is useful to try to determine what lines of work your audience engages in and to use that knowledge to adapt your message based on their commonly shared work experiences or on the values typically shared by those particular workers. What changes, for example, would you make on the topic of “Executive Salaries in Local Indus-try” for each of the following audiences: line workers in a busy and growing factory, laid-off workers meeting at the Union Hall, and a new crop of management trainees? Club and Organizational Memberships We work and we play. Our club and organizational memberships indicate with whom we socialize in our leisure hours. Is this the Lions or Optimists club you are trying to persuade? If so, what do you know about these organizations? What shared values lead Analyzing Audiences 5-14 people to involve themselves in such clubs? Is it a job-related club or is it completely social? Does the club do some sort of community service? Different clubs and organizations each have their own reasons for existing, and each have their own values that tend to bind their members together. When trying to persuade members of a social organization, try to find out what values the group professes and adapt your message to take advantage of those involvements in your message. Religious Preferences Few social involvements are as influential on a person’s beliefs and actions as their religious preferences. Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Taoist, or Shinto—a person’s religious preferences involve him or her with countless other people who share the same faith. Every religion and denomination has its own central articles of faith that its adherents use as premises for action and as bases for developing derivative beliefs about more secular matters. Moreover, most religious faiths create periodic opportunities for worship with others who share their beliefs—religious services, holidays, rites of passage such as weddings and funerals— opportunities that allow the faithful to publicly bespeak their common beliefs. Whether or not your message concerns an overtly religious topic, your audience’s religious preferences may still influence their receptiveness to your ideas. Accordingly, you should take these preferences into account as you plan the strategies for your message. CULTURAL INVOLVEMENTS CULTURE may be defined as a group’s set of commonly shared beliefs and all of the signs and symbols that are used to express those beliefs. From a persuasion perspective, this suggests that you must be sensitive to both the underlying system of beliefs shared by the people you are speaking to AND to the signs and symbols they use to express those beliefs. To inadvertently insult some ethnic or cultural constituency in your audience because you misunderstand their most cherished ideas or misuse their most significant symbols not only characterizes you as insensitive but also jeopardizes your chances of success. For example, a culturally careless remark during a speech by James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior during the Ronald Reagan’s first administration in the 1980s, eventually cost him his job—not to mention his success in a speech. Furthermore, by failing to be aware of the cultural involvements that may exist in your audience, you are likely to miss valuable opportunities to relate your topic to your audience’s commonly shared and deeply motivating cultural experience. To see how necessary adapting a message to the cultural involvements of an audience can be, read the speeches of politicians as they move from community to community, speaking among the electorate. What you will find are specific references to each community’s cultural values as they attempt to connect their general political message with the specific values of the community in which the speech is being given. Identifying your message with the cultural involvements of your audience can play an important role in determining whether or not your ideas get a favorable hearing. Analyzing Audiences 5-19 anticipate receiving a message. Let’s look at five common expectations people typically generate whenever they know they are going to be exposed to a carefully crafted message. Expectations about the Source of the Message If you are sending a message and your audience is receiving it, audience members assume there must be a reason for that relationship. Accordingly, they expect to hear someone who is qualified to speak about the topic, someone who has some special kind of experience, expertise, or competence. This is a minimal type of expectation, and all audiences will have it. In addition to knowing what you are talking about, you must also show that you know. The audience will expect your subject knowledge and personal trustworthiness to show through the message. This expectation may be fulfilled by such things as the confidence you exhibit as you speak, your skillful use of recognized authorities to support your ideas, and by references and allusions to your sources of expertise. Furthermore, an audience expects you to be a person of good will—someone who not only knows, but who will also present the information in a responsible manner. This means that you must seem to be someone who will not distort information or withhold relevant facts that may be needed to assess your case. Often this feeling is carried more by your manner of delivery than by anything specific you say. Expectations about the Topic and Purpose Sometimes your audience will know ahead of time what your topic is going to be and sometimes it won’t. But once they know, they will generate expectations about the type of content they will hear, depending upon the general situation in which the message takes place. The travel club that arrives to hear a message on Africa will probably not expect to hear a message on African political strife. On the other hand, the public policy forum will expect to hear about current political activities. Different types of situations invite different types of audience expectations concerning a topic. If you have doubts about what your audience may expect, ask whoever has helped arrange your message in the first place what your audience’s likely topical expectations are going to be. As an example of how an audience’s topical expectations can affect the judgment of a message, in George Bush’s 1992 State of the Union address, topical expectations had been built especially high because the President had been telling campaign audiences for weeks that the details of his plans for stimulating an economic recovery would be revealed during his State of the Union address. Depending upon how high various people’s expectations were, the message was either construed as a substantial success or a superficial failure. In the weeks following the message, the majority view seemed to be that the message did not live up to the expectations the President had been building for it. He simply had put too much emphasis on a single message, and his popularity fell when he could not live up to the expectations. Every message must also have a fundamental purpose: a reason for being given. Accordingly, audiences expect that they will be able to determine what that purpose is very early in their listening activity. Once they have found your purpose, they will have a much easier time understanding your message. Because your audience depends upon learning your overall purpose, they will be restless until they determine what it is. To fulfill their expectation, reveal your central purpose early in your message, and be sure to adhere to it as the message progresses. To avoid disorienting your audience’s expectations, announce any “side trips” you plan to take away from your central theme. Analyzing Audiences 5-20 Expectations about the Speaking Occasion Is the occasion an after-dinner speech? Then the audience will expect a lighter treatment of your topic (whatever it is) than they would if the message were given at a business meeting. Is the community up in arms about a new zoning ordinance? Are you angry? Then those who hear you will expect to feel your involvement. Is the message for a special occasion—to mark an event such as Memorial Day or accepting an award? There are special message forms for such occasions because special occasions create their own patterns of expectations about your message. Thus, you should assess the specific demands of the situation and make sure you fulfill the expectations appropriate to the occasion. Expectations about Your Preparation/Expertise You may be an expert in aerospace engineering, but have you prepared for this particular message? What difference does it make whether you are talking to a high school science club or the graduate students in aerospace technology? Each audience expects a separately prepared message. Even in politics, where a candidate for national office must present the same essential ideas dozens of times to nearly identical audiences all over the country, adaptations must be made from place to place. Communities differ in how they personally experience national issues, and politicians are usually aware of the situational details that make a difference in how a general campaign theme affects them. Audiences expect you to prepare your message especially for them, and they will be disappointed if it looks as if you have not. Most fundamentally, however, audiences will have general expectations about your preparation to give a message at all. That is, they will expect you to have actually constructed a message—not just to have strung together a series of random thoughts. Specifically, your audience will have expectations about the following four aspects of your message preparation: 1. Your message’s content, organization, or structure. A message is not a series of randomly selected ideas; it is a patterned fabric of ideas woven into a whole cloth. Audiences expect your message to be coherently constructed and thoughtfully developed with them in mind. 2. Your preparedness as a communicator. Audiences expect your delivery to be skillful and competent, that you have rehearsed your message in preparation for this occasion. Don’t disappoint them on this or all else may be lost. 3. Your fairness. Having given you their attention, audiences expect you to repay them by treating them fairly—that is, by treating the topic as even-handedly as the situation permits. 4. Your understanding of your audience. Audiences expect you to have taken some care in understanding their needs—exactly the kind of thing discussed in the first portion of the chapter. That is, audiences expect that you will adapt your message to them. Expectations about Your Personal Ethics From almost as early as we have had handbooks teaching the principles of public speaking, there have also been critics of the art—critics who challenge both the ethics of the communicator and the moral character of the rhetorical art. Learning the principles of effective communicating, these critics argue, means having power over others, and the Analyzing Audiences 5-21 temptation to use that power unfairly is too great. “To make the worse case seem the better,” they have worried. The concern is not entirely unfounded. There have been many instances where the gift of effective speaking has been used to mislead, befuddle, and confuse. But the misuse of speaking cannot prevent people from talking and listening to one another; nor can it prevent people from being strongly influenced by what others say. We are the articulate mammal (Aitchison, 1978), Homo loquens is our nature (Fry, 1977), and worrying extensively over whether or not we should try to use our speaking abilities to influence others is nearly as futile as wondering whether we should breathe because the carbon dioxide we exhale might pollute the air. However polluted the air might accidentally become, we still must breathe. Similarly, however risky it may seem, we must talk in order to express the fullness of our humanity. And our words will have an impact on others: this cannot be avoided. But just as we have developed standards, codes, and laws concerning the kinds of pollutants that can be put into the air others must breathe, we have also developed standards for the words that can be projected into the air for others to hear. We believe, and often enforce by laws, such standards as the following: 1. No one should knowingly promote something as true that they honestly believe to be false. 2. No one should suggest a greater degree of certainty about their beliefs than their evidence will actually support. 3. No one should misuse the available facts to support their cause. 4. No one should withhold information that might be relevant to the issue under discussion. 5. No one should distort information to make it conform to their own position. These are among the most important ethical standards that apply to communicators, both public and private. Such standards constitute expectations your audience has about your message and your audience will assume—lacking evidence to the contrary—that you are adhering to these standards. Furthermore, audiences have ways of finding out—in time if not immediately—the falseness of your words. Unless you are already known to be a fraud, your audience expects you to be ethical and will quickly turn on you if they discover otherwise. INVESTIGATING THE AUDIENCE The discussion of audience involvements and expectations in the other sections has emphasized the role that audiences play in the communication process. For although you may construct an otherwise brilliant message, if it is not adapted to your audience it may fail to connect with their knowledge, interests, and abilities—leaving them cold and you wondering why you were unsuccessful. To help improve your chances of effectively communicating your ideas, you will need to discover as much as you can about your audience ahead of time. The goal of your investigation is to determine how the audience members are involved with one another and how you may involve them with your topic. Then you can adapt how you express your ideas—using appropriate definitions, examples, anecdotes, statistics, visual imagery, and so on. The point is to try to take full advantage of the forces (i.e., involvements) already at work within your audience, thereby giving your ideas an audience-based form that enhances the energy you have already put into thinking about Analyzing Audiences 5-22 your message. Knowing your audience, and adapting to their needs, interests, and motivations is, then, one the keys to successful speaking. Mass marketers and national politicians perform elaborate audience analyses to determine how to target their message appeals. In businesses, large organizations, and local community politics, speaking occasions usually develop fairly quickly (with only a few days to a few weeks notice) and end after a single message or short campaign has been presented. In such situations the audience is frequently predictable enough that running down a checklist of the demographic, social, and topical involvements provides the amount of information you need to help you accomplish your goals with a reasonable chance of success. A sample checklist is presented at the end of this section. Having a checklist is a handy starting point; but how would you proceed to answer the questions it raises concerning an unfamiliar audience? Depending upon how you came to be presenting the your message in the first place, there are several different ways you can find out what you need to know. Personal Contact with Representatives of the Target Audience First, you can contact the person who is responsible for arranging the occasion on which you will be presenting your message. If you have been invited, for example, to speak before a club or organization, the program chairperson should be able to supply you with information about the group, its values, its demographic characteristics, its level of prior knowledge and, most importantly perhaps, its expectations in asking you to speak. Second, if you cannot get enough information in this way, you may then want to follow up what you learn from the program chair and contact other group, organization, or club members. Perhaps they will be able to give you additional information about the audience. Third, you will want to review your own experiences with audiences you consider similar to your anticipated audience. Focus Groups Second, you can gather a representative group together from your larger target audience and invite them to share their background and interests with you. Such a group is often called a FOCUS GROUP because they have been gathered together to “focus” on your topic in order to give you the insights you need. If they are truly representative, you will have a better idea what to expect from your target audience and the kind of message appeals that might be most effective. Another way that you can utilize a focus group in planning your persuasive message or campaign is to use them to pretest your possible message strategies. That is, you can try out alternate versions of your message on them and ask them to explain what they liked or disliked about the various versions of the message. Their comments should help you refine your message strategies and tactics. Published Materials [E.g., NGO applying to a funding source] Third, if the occasion is particularly important, or the speaking challenge is especially difficult or urgent, you may also wish to read about the group you are trying to influence: in the local newspaper, in the literature produced by the group itself, and in library resources available about them. Analyzing Audiences 5-23 Websites Many groups and organizations you will be trying to influence have produced websites that reveal their goals and aspirations. This resources is especially important also if you are being employed by such an organization (or its competitors!) to help design its persuasive messages. For you will gain an insight into how the organization currently assesses its target audience. That is, they way it currently tries to persuade others is a sign that helps to reveal what its audiences may be and how they are approached now. Surveys Finally, you may even think it necessary to conduct a written survey of the group’s interests and opinions before you can determine how best to adapt your speech to their prior needs and involvements. Some of these methods require more work than others, but the information you gain can be significant in the eventual success of your speech. So the time spent is typically worthwhile. Below are several items: (a) an audience analysis checklist and (b) a series of scenarios, and (c) questions for thought and review that can help you with your audience analysis for a particular message of campaign. Audience Analysis Checklist I. Demographic Involvements A. Sexual composition of my audience? B. Age of my audience? C. Social or economic class of my audience? D. Educational level of my audience? II. Social Involvements A. Employment place or type? B. Club or organizational memberships? C. Religious preferences? III. Cultural Involvements A. Ethnic background of my audience? B. National culture of my audience? C. Regional culture of my audience? D. Local culture of my audience? IV. Topical Involvements A. Audience’s prior interest in the topic B. Audience’s prior knowledge about the topic? C. Audience’s prior attitudes or values concerning the topic? Analyzing Audiences 5-24 D. Audience’s prior actions in regard to the topic? 1. Words (verbal commitments related to the topic)? 2. Deeds (things done in support or against the topic)? V. Anticipated Audience Expectations A. Expectations about the Source of the Message B. Expectations about the Source’s Topic and Purpose C. Expectations about the Occasion D. Expectations about the Source’s Preparation E. Expectations about the Source’s Personal Ethics QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW 1. How are demographic, social, and topical involvements different from one another? In other words, what characteristics define each of the three categories? 2. Is it possible to generally rank the three types of audience involvements from the most important to least important? If not, why not? Does your answer change when it is applied to specific topics? For example, what are the most important involvements on such topics as abortion rights, the future of organized labor in the China, the safety of artificial breast implants, society’s responsibility to police and firefighters disabled in the line of duty, and sexism in elementary school classroom practices? 3. What are some of your classmates’ most significant demographic, social, and topical involvements? For example, are you all about the same age? From similar social, cultural, or racial backgrounds? What are the relevant involvements that arise because you all chose to attend the same college? 4. Once you have selected a topic for your persuasive message, how can you adapt what you know about your audience’s involvements to adapt your message more fully to your audience? That is, what differences can it make now that you know the ways in which your listeners are demographically, socially, and topically involved with one another? 5. What expectations would your classmates have about you if you were required to present a persuasive speech in class? Will any of these expectations be negative? What do you plan to do so that your speech won’t disappoint their positive expectations and won’t fulfill their negative ones? For example, assuming that your speech topic comes from your college major or work experience, how might you attempt to satisfy the audience’s expectation that you have sufficient knowledge about your topic? 6. What ethical standards would your audience expect you to fulfill? Have you ever listened to a message whose ethical standards you questioned? On what basis did you doubt the persuader’s integrity? 7. Suppose that we had followed Mr. Chan back to the family party and someone new asked him, “How’s school?” while the entire group was assembled. How might his answer be different when given to this general audience of all his friends and relatives?