GE ELEC 1: Public speaking & Persuasion

CHAPTER 5: ANALYZING THE AUDIENCE

After choosing or selecting your topic, and how you can create your general and specific purpose, the next
step is to get to know your audience. As a public speaker, one must be audience-centered.

What is audience-centeredness?

• audience-centeredness – keeping the audience foremost in mind every step of speech

preparation and presentation.

Good public speakers are audience-centered. You are an audience-centered speaker if your purpose in your
speech is to gain a favorable response from the major groups in your audience. You can do it by presenting yourself
and your ideas in ways that are connected with the audience’s goals, values, and beliefs.

To be audience-centered, you need to keep several questions in mind when you work on your speeches:

- To whom am I speaking? (Who are my audiences?)

- What do I want them to know, believe, or do as a result of my speech?
- What is the most effective way of composing and presenting my speech to accomplish that aim?

When you make a speech, either in class or in some other forum, keep in mind the need to be audience-centered.
Think in advance about your listeners’ background and interests, about their level of knowledge regarding the speech
topic, and about their attitudes regarding your stance on the topic.

Effective speakers seek to create a bond with their listeners by emphasizing common values, goals, and
experiences. Communication scholars call this process identification.

• identification – a process in which speakers seek to create a bond with the audience by
emphasizing common values, goals, and experience.

YOUR CLASSMATES AS AN AUDIENCE

There is a tendency – among students and teachers alike – to view the classroom as an artificial speaking
situation. In a way, it is. Your speech class is a testing ground where you can develop our communication skills before
applying them outside the classroom.

It is easy to lose sight of your fellow students as an authentic audience. Because all of you will be required
to deliver a speech.
Most of your classroom speeches would not have immediate impact. Nevertheless, any topic that you
handle can influence your listeners – can enrich their experience, broaden their knowledge, perhaps change their
views about something important.

But one of the challenges for you as a speaker is to make your audience listen to you, completely.
Sometimes, audience pay close attention; at other times, they let their thoughts wander.

Even when people do pay attention, they do not process a speaker’s message exactly as the speaker intends.
Every speech contains two messages – the one sent by the speaker and the one received by the listener. What a
speaker says is filtered through listener’s frame of reference. As a result, we listen and respond to speeches not as
they are, but as we are. Or, sometimes according to a particular song “people hear what they want to hear and
disregard the rest.”

• egocentric – the tendency of people to be concerned above all with their own values, beliefs, and
well-being.
 GE ELEC 1: Public speaking & Persuasion
CHAPTER 5: ANALYZING THE AUDIENCE

As Harry Emerson Fosdick, the great preacher, once said: “There is nothing that people are so interested in
as themselves, their own problems, and the way to solve them. The fact is … the primary starting point of all public
speaking”.

DEMOGRAPHIC AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

One of the ways speakers analyze audiences is by looking at demographic traits such as age; gender;
sexual orientation; religion; group membership; racial, ethnic, or cultural background; and the like.

• demographic audience analysis – it focuses on demographic factors such as age, gender, religion,
sexual orientation, group membership.

While demographic audience analysis can be a useful tool in understanding your audience like all tools, it
can be used improperly. When analyzing demographic information about your audience, it is essential that you avoid
stereotyping.

• stereotyping – creating an oversimplified image of a particular group of people, usually by

assuming that all members of the group are alike.

Here are few of the major demographic factors you should consider:

1. Age. Each generation has more or less common values and experiences that set it apart from other generations.
2. Gender. It is important to recognize that men and women are not alike in all their values and beliefs.
3. Sexual Orientation. No matter what one’s attitude toward different sexual orientations, audience-centered
speakers are alert to how their messages will be received by people of various sexual orientations.
4. Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Background. Understanding attitudes of listeners about race and ethnicity is crucial
for speakers. They do not know whether they are addressing a mixed-race audience or one with little apparent
racial diversity.
5. Religion. You cannot assume that your views on religion – whatever they may be – are shared by your listeners.
6. Group Membership.

SITUATIONAL AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

Situational audience analysis usually builds on demographic analysis. It identifies traits of the audience
unique to the speaking situation at hand. These traits include the size of the audience, the physical setting, and the
disposition of the audience toward the subject, the speaker, and the occasion.

1. Size.
2. Physical Setting.
3. Disposition toward the Topic. You should keep your audience in mind when choosing a topic. Ideally, you will pick
a topic that suits them as well as it suits you.
3.1. Interest.
3.2. Knowledge.
3.3. Attitude.

4. Disposition toward the Speaker. The more competent listeners believe a speaker to be, the more likely they are
to accept what he or she says.
GE ELEC 1: Public speaking & Persuasion
CHAPTER 5: ANALYZING THE AUDIENCE

5. Disposition toward the Occasion. Listeners have fairly definite ideas about the speeches they consider
appropriate.

GETTING INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUDIENCE

Now that you know what to learn about an audience, the question is how do you learn it? Constructing
questionnaire is not something you can be expected to master in a speech class. By following a few basic guidelines,
you can learn to develop a good questionnaire for analyzing your classroom audience.

Three Major Types of Questions

1. Fixed-alternative questions. As their name implies, it offers a fixed choice between two or more responses. For
example:

“Do you know the effects of the new law?”

Yes ____________
No _____________
Not sure _________

By limiting the possible responses, such questions produce clear, unambiguous answers.

fixed-alternative questions – questions that offer a fixed choice between two or more alternatives.

2. Scale questions. It resembled fixed-alternative questions, but they allow more leeway in responding. For example:

Very seldom -------------l--------------l-----------------l-----------------l-------------- Very often

Questions like these are especially useful for getting at the strength of a respondent’s attitudes.

scale questions – questions that require responses at fixed intervals along a scale of answers.

3. Open-ended questions. It gives maximum leeway in responding. For example:

“How can the new law affect your business?”

Although open-ended questions invite more detailed responses than the other two types of questions, they also
increase the likelihood of getting answers that do not give the kind of information you need.

• open-ended questions – questions that allow respondents to answer however they want.

In putting together your own questionnaire, keep the following principles in mind:

1. Plan the questionnaire carefully to elicit precisely the information you need.
2. Use all three types of questions – fixed-alternative, scale, and open-ended.
3. Make sure the questions are clear and unambiguous.
4. Keep the questionnaire relatively brief.