European Sociological Review VOLUME 22 NUMBER 4 SEPTEMBER 2006 397–411 397 DOI:10.1093/esr/jcl004, available online at www.esr.oxfordjournals.org Online publication 28 April 2006 © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org Patterns of Audio-Visual Consumption: The Reflection of Objective Divisions in Class Structure Jordi López-Sintas and Ercilia García-Álvarez The heterogeneous behaviour of Spanish audio-visual audiences could be encapsulated into five classes: (1) television fans, (2) occasional film-goers, (3) light film-goers, (4) film fans, and (5) audio-visual fans. When the five clusters of audio-visual consumers were analysed according to a set of sociocultural indicators, they appeared ordered as listed above, from downscale to upscale audiences, giving support to Bourdieu’s homology thesis. Accordingly, the media orientations of each type of audience also differed: upscale audiences used the media for tension release (entertainment) and for integrative-status purposes and downscale audiences, for integrative-social and cognitive reasons (education and information). All in all, the results suggest that the five clusters of audio-visual consumption found reflected the objective divisions in the class structure that the sociology of culture proposes. Introduction In the late 1950s, Katz (1959) suggested a move towards viewing mass communication as something sought by people (active audience) instead of the usual focus on the consumption of media and the production of effects (passive audience). Although many media studies have been conducted following this research strategy, most pieces of research have focused their attention on only one communication channel (one audio-visual medium or device): children’s use of video cassette recorder (VCR) (Cohen et al., 1988), CD-ROM ownership and Internet capability in providing gratifications (Perse and Dunn, 1998), changing patterns of television consump- tion (Robinson, 1981), gratifications sought through television consumption (Becker, 1979; Lee and Lee, 1995), television consumption as a psychological escap- ism (Henning and Vorderer, 2001), clusters of media that explain the gratification sought by audiences (van Rees and van Eijck, 2003), types of readers and televi- sion-viewing behaviour (van Eijck and van Rees, 2000), the role of newspapers in the mass media system (Weibull, 1992). The main drawback of using the gratifi- cations strategy for audience research is that it is a research approach rather than a theoretical framework (Elliot, 1974). Consequently, the results are difficult to interpret and correlate for the purpose of advancing our understanding of the subject. In contrast with earlier research, our analysis also includes audio-visual research by looking at consumers’ audio-visual use (cinema, VCR use—rentals and pur- chases, television-viewing behaviour), degree of use at UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA on September 23, 2014 http://esr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from