Layer 1: The Situational Analysis
Layer 1: The Situational Analysis
The situational audience analysis layer considers the situation for which your audience is gathered. This layer is primarily concerned with why your audience is assembled in the first place. Are they willingly gathered to hear you speak? Have your audience members paid to hear you? Or, are your audience members literally “speech captives” who have somehow been socially or systematically coerced into hearing you? These factors are decisively important, because they place a major responsibility upon you as a speaker, whichever the case. The entire tone and agenda of your speech rests largely upon whether or not your audience even wants to hear from you.
Many audiences are considered captive audiences in that they have no real choice regarding the matter of hearing a given speech. In general, these are some of the most difficult audiences to address because these members are being forced to listen to a message and do not have the full exercise of their own free will. Consider for a moment when you have been called to a mandatory work meeting. Were you truly happy to listen to the speaker, in all honesty? Some might say “yes,” but usually most would rather be doing something else with their time. This is an important factor to keep in mind when preparing your speech: some simply do not want to listen to a speech they believe is compulsory.
The voluntary audience situation, in stark contrast, is completely different. A voluntary audience is willingly assembled to listen to a given message. As a rule, these audiences are much easier to address because they are interested in hearing the speech at hand. To visualize how this works, reflect upon the last speech, concert, or show you’ve attended of your own accord. While the event may or may not have lived up to your overall expectations, the very fact that you freely went to the occasion speaks volumes about your predisposition to listen to—and perhaps even be persuaded by—the information being presented.
There’s something else to be said about captive versus voluntary audiences, as well. Modern communication researchers have found that captive audiences are more heterogeneous and that voluntary audiences are more homogeneous. In other words, when captive audiences are gathered, the audience is typically heterogeneous or characterized by many demographic differences among individuals. On the other hand, when voluntary audiences assemble, by and large, they are populated by homogeneous groupings, or, audiences which are characterized more by their demographic similarities than their differences.
Sometimes audiences are mixed in their situational settings, too. For
instance, take the everyday classroom situation. While college is pronounced to be a voluntary listening situation in that students choose to attend higher education, many people in the college classroom environment sadly feel as if they are still “trapped” in school, and would rather be elsewhere. Obviously, this perception colors how information is being processed—and in some cases, not being processed. On the other hand, some students in college are truly there by choice, and attentively seek out knowledge from their teacher-mentors. What results from this mixed audience situation is a hybrid captive-voluntary audience, with those who are only partially interested in what is going on in the classroom and those who are genuinely involved.
Of course, this leaves you with a difficult set of circumstances when
preparing for your class speeches. Both you and your professor are well aware that the audience you will be speaking to did not enroll in the course to hear from you, specifically. However, this difficulty of speaking to a hybrid captive-voluntary audience does present you with an excellent opportunity: you will have the good fortune of speaking to people who do and do not, fully, want to hear from you. What a prospect! You literally get to hone your speech skills on both types of audiences, thereby learning a skill set that many never get to exercise. You should begin this wonderful opportunity by considering ways to inform, persuade, and humor a mixed situation audience. Think of it as a learning occasion, and you’ll do just fine.
