Audience reception study of Korean dramas among malay women

Abstract

This is a reception study of Korean dramas among Malaysian women, the aim of which to answer two research questions: (1) How do Malaysian women read Korean drama media text?; and (2) In what way do women of different age groups hold diverse and parallel readings of Korean drama media text? Informed by Stuart Hall’s (1980) Encoding/Decoding method, a qualitative methodology using focus group interviews was taken to garner deeper understanding and to yield richer information on the social phenomenon among informants who are avid viewers of Korean dramas. Four focus-group interview sessions were conducted with each group comprising of six individuals, in which the discourses were guided by semi-structured interview protocols. Two of the four focus groups were made up of working and married adult respondents, while the other two groups represented the student, single adolescent respondents. Prompts in the form of edited clips of selected popular Korean dramas were shown to the participants during the interview as a stimulus to gauge engaging discourse, as well as serving as cues in recalling their Korean drama viewing diet experiences. At the end of the interviews, participants were asked to respond to a short questionnaire, which included questions on demographic information and viewing patterns of Korean dramas. The researcher prepared the verbatim transcriptions of the focus group interviews. Analysis of the interview data yielded eight themes after rigorous coding process. The themes were: male-centric, family-oriented, female-centric, cultural pattern, storyline, cosmopolitan lifestyle, realism, and parasocial relationship. The readings of the themes varied across the focus group clusters (adults and adolescents), based on the three types of readings namely dominant, oppositional and negotiated reading. The respondents were also found to have parallel and divergent reading between the two clusters. The discussion of the findings were presented in light of their demographic differences.