AbstractTitle: What TV-glasses do you wear? A study in how party-political people decode the TVshow Scooby Doo (Vilka tv-glasögon har du? En studie i hur partipolitiskt aktiva personer tolkar tv-serien Scooby Doo)Number of pages: 47 (54 including enclosures)Author: Christopher LandstedtTutor: Amelie HössjerCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Autumn term 2007University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The aim of this essay is to make a study in how party-political people, 18-25 years old, both female and male, decode the messages in the TV-show Scooby Doo from 1969. Do they decode the show differently because of their political view, their gender or, and their social background? Is there a pattern in the decoding or is it based on a more individual level?Material/Method: A qualitative method containing a total number of 16 individual interviews with young adults, 18-25 years old, half of them female, the other half male, were used. All of the participants are members of political youth parties/organizations, equally divided in left and right wing parties. Scooby Doo was chosen thanks to the lack of political meanings and messages in the show and its objective aura. The respondents got to see a preselected episode from the first season ever of Scooby Doo. After they finished watching the show, the interview took place. The interview contained questions on a deeper lever regardingthe episode. Stuart Hall’s all time classic encoding-decoding theory is used as the main theory with the support from other theories in the same field.Main results: The degree of active reading is overall equal among the young adults that participated in the study. Differences can be found in the way they decode the sender’s messages and what values they put into the message. The leftwing respondents tended to decode the show in more oppositional way than the rightwing people who tended to read the messages dominant. There is an exception to every rule, also in this case. To sum it all up in o...
