Social and Cultural Influences in Reception of a Development-oriented Television Programme in a Multi-ethnic Society

This research sought to understand how a multi-ethnic society interprets a development-orientedte levision programme. In other words, it dwelt into the reception activities of the people from various cultural backgrounds as they watched such a programme. The integration of the SocialSciences method of inquiry and the Humanities enabled a comparative empirical analysis to becarried out on this topic specifically between the media and the audience discourses. A preliminarystudy was first conducted with a purpose of identifYing issues that were to be incorporated intothe structured questionnaire which were later used in the focus group sessions. The focus groupwas the main method of inquiry through which data were collected from various study groups andcomparatively assessed. From the findings we found that different ethnic groups made sense ofthe television programme in a complex and manipulated way, thus, resulting in the productionof various meanings that reflect their personal invested interests. The study also supported th atinterpretations of television programme content were social and discursive . The socially boundedfactors of the respondents such as their cultures, working style and attitude and educational levelwere found to have contributed to the shaping of the respective decoding behaviours. Theirpredispositions came into playas they relate to the particular media contents forcing them to takedifferent decoding positions. The Parkin s Theory of Meaning Systems (1972) help to measurethese decoding positions and described them as the dominant, the negotiation and the oppositionaLHowever, this study suggested that a more flexi measure if developed could account for complexityand multi-variability in meaning making of media messages. Interestingly, this study also indicatedthat the subject of development could also be analyzed from the communication viewpoint usingthe significant communication models. In particular, the present Malaysian development strategies,with special reference to the challenges of Vision 2020, were analyzed through the interpretationof the respondents on the selected television programme. The respondents were very concernedabout the perception that the development policies were politically-bound, thus causing certainlevel of anxiety among the different ethnic groups with different dominant level. Meaningsproduced as a result of interactions with media contents are not conceived merely at thepsychological level of the users but often reaching the realm of the sociological influences too. Thestudy suggested that a similar research be conducted in other multi-ethnic societies in other partsof the world.