A Novel Method to Gauge Audience Engagement with Televised Election Debates through Instant, Nuanced Feedback Elicitation

Abstract

Despite a steep increase in the use of the Internet and handheld computing devices for media consumption, television is still of critical importance for democratic citizenship. Television continues to be the leading source of political information and its relevance has been recognised at policy level. In addition, television keeps evolving technologically and in how it is experienced by viewers. Nonetheless, the ways researchers have measured audience engagement with televised political events in real-time is often limited to small samples of viewers and is based upon a narrow range of responses.In this paper we look at the audience of televised election debates, and propose a new method to gauge the richness and variety of citizens' real-time responses at scale by capturing nuanced, nonintrusive, simple and measurable audience feedback. We report on a paper prototype experiment, in which we used a set of ashcards to test the method in an actual televised election debate scenario. We demonstrate how the method can improve our understanding of viewer responses to the debaters' performances, to the contents in their arguments, and to the debate as media event. We conclude with design guidelines to implement the method on a mass scale in order to measure audience engagement with televised election debates in distributed contexts through audience feedback web and mobile applications.

Audience and Expert Perspectives on Second Screen Engagement with Political Debates

“…We recruited 18 participants through mailing lists, posters, flyers, political Facebook groups, Twitter, and snowball sampling at each workshop. This relatively small cohort of participants reflects similar qualitative research practices [12,13,16]. The events allowed us to generate 8 hours of in-depth group discussions and 212 written notes generated by the participants.…”

“…To simplify interfaces, workshop participants imagined an agree/disagree interface for rapid feedback, but other possibilities exist. Previous research has explored feedback cards to allow viewers to give nuanced feedback [12] or social tagging as a way to enable critical viewing [16]. New technological developments in the home, such as Internet of Things devices, could help facilitate instant interactions with the debate content and provide an alternative to conventional applications [23].…”

Democratic Replay: Enhancing TV Election Debates with Interactive Visualisations

“…Most significantly, second screens enable the enhancement of televised events towards interactive experiences that can be tailored to individual viewers [10,11]. The development of programme-specific companion apps can organise and deliver these enhancements, both inbound by channelling streams of synchronised information from the internet to the viewers [12], and outbound by giving viewers a voice through dedicated comment channels and social media [6,4] or via special-purpose audience feedback elicitation techniques [13].…”

“…The Audience Reflections Radar: Crowdsourcing Instant Audience Responses. We built on the approach by De Liddo et al [13] and incorporated the results of their instant feedback method as one of the analytics visualised in Democratic Replay. The current method consists of 20 cards arranged in five dimensions based on the citizens entitlements in connection with televised elections debates identified by Moss and Coleman [32].…”

“…The application registers responses that are linked to a unique user identifier and to the current timestamp in the debate. These annotations are then analysed to give a rich understanding of the audience's assessment of the media event (see [13] and Figure 4…”