[ecrea] IAMCR Panel on Audience Research Methods - Call for participants

Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to draw your attention to our interest in proposing a 
panel at the upcoming 2012 IAMCR Conference in Durban (RSA) with the 
following provisional title:
*Measuring and/or Understanding Audiences in a Complex Media Landscape: 
New methods and resources to investigate audiences and/or users*
Below these lines you can find a short description of our topics of 
interest, to be developed more detailed once we have found enough 
partners in this initiative. Please note that we need to find 4 or 5 
people participating in this conference and sharing these research 
interests, in order to propose this panel to the Section. As you might 
be aware of, the deadline for sending proposals is February the 14^th , 
so we kindly ask to all of you interested in participating to contact us 
by February 5^th at the latest, as we will need time to prepare our 
final panel proposal.
With our best regards,
Frauke Zeller: (fzeller /at/ wlu.ca) <mailto:(fzeller /at/ wlu.ca)>
Miguel Vicente-Mariño: (mvicentem /at/ yahoo.es) <mailto:(mvicentem /at/ yahoo.es)> / 
(miguelvm /at/ soc.uva.es) <mailto:(miguelvm /at/ soc.uva.es)>
*PANEL PROPOSAL*
Title (preliminary)
*Measuring and/or Understanding Audiences in a Complex Media Landscape: 
New methods and resources to investigate audiences and/or users*
Framing text (preliminary)
Both societies and individuals are transforming their media consumption 
strategies as a consequence of the fast technological evolution. All 
these processes are challenging the way audiences and societies are 
researched by scholars and practitioners worldwide. While the number of 
users is still growing, the paths described by those individuals are 
getting more diversified and complex. Consequently, research methods 
related to the mass communication period are not per se sufficient to 
understand how the media landscape is transformed, developing and most 
of all experienced nowadays.
This panel presents some of the methodological contributions gathered 
during the development of the COST Action ‘Transforming Audiences, 
Transforming Societies’. The main goal for this session is to provide 
the attendees with knowledge about how the audience measurement devices 
are answering to the challenge of dealing with a changing environment. 
Main public opinion industries need to provide users and operators with 
accurate data about media consumption, while the urgency to better 
understand the purposes and motivations of media users is growing to 
complete a deeper knowledge about how they build their relation with 
media content.
Chair
Frauke Zeller / Miguel Vicente-Mariño
Discussant
Miguel Vicente-Mariño / Frauke Zeller
*SHORT NOTICE: Please note that each abstract’s author should submit 
their full abstract (max. 500 words) through the OCS System available at 
the Conference’s website. Abstracts submissions must include the panel's 
title in the first line of the abstract*