ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of effects research. This history bears witness to surprisingly shifting assessments of the nature and scope of media effects; it also suggests variable notions of what it means to be an audience, a user, or a public. The most common approach to studying the diffusion of innovations has been survey methodologies, as accumulated in national and international statistics as well as market research. While the diffusion-of-innovations framework thus lends itself to a whole range of media – from writing and literacy to social network sites – it should be noted that the research tradition has addressed innovations in a far broader sense: information with an instrumental value in agriculture, healthcare, family planning, and so on. The chapter also reviews the main varieties of quantitative audience studies and the stages of the communicative process that they each focus on.
