MORE THAN ENTERTAINMENT : RECEPTION STUDIES OF AMERICAN TV SERIES/SERIALS IN CHINESE COLLEGE STUDENTS

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to examine the current reception situation of the chosen four American TV series in Chinese college campuses. Rather than focusing on the series content, this thesis would focus much more on the audience part, to explore how the personal backgrounds and social factors would influence certain ATS received by certain group of people. This research is based on 222 valid responses from a highly structured questionnaire. The responses are collected from five universities which are located in the east, west, south, north and middle of China, with consideration of gender, major and school year as basic variables. The questionnaire is published on a website. Students are given a web link, finish the questionnaire and submit their answers online. Collected materials are processed with Excel functions and illustrated both by numbers and different graphs. The analysis revealed that there existed several motivations for Chinese students to watch American TV series and it turned out to have influence on them in a more or less similar way. A noticeable finding includes that both the motivations and the influences vary depending on the students' age, gender, major and the geographic location they belong to. And this is supported by the data obtained from their responses. Generally speaking, motivations for Chinese students include practicing English and gaining knowledge of western culture and societies through watching ATS; following the fashion in order to get along better with their peers; enhancing self-identity by choosing different genres; and escaping from study pressure from the real life. Very interesting phenomenon is that few students watch ATS merely for relaxation, which means ATS is received in China more than a simple tool for entertainment. Most of the motivations are gratified. Studies show that ATS does have great impact on Chinese college students both as a language learning tool and a culture messenger. However, it should be noted that influences vary depending on some factors. Geographically speaking, students in the less developed cities in China, where educational infrastructure is relatively backward, mostly utilized ATS as a useful tool to improve their English; while students in the developed cities, find more similarities between their life and what is portrayed on the screen hence they believe the greatest influences lie in culture aspects. Studies also found that, compared with boys, girls are more likely to be influenced by external factors such as peer pressure. In terms of genre, girls show evident preference for romance and emotions while boys insist their likes on crime, technology, violence etc. Senior students, due to more spare time out of class, indicate a more positive engagement in watching ATS, with more time devoted to it while the freshmen obviously have less time because they are busy with themselves not only in class but also in other extra-class activities in addition to ATS. Students of different majors show diverse preferences for different genres, which is supported by data from the research, too. General findings can be expanded and concluded into two aspects: Firstly, ATS is more than an entertainment in Chinese college campus; secondly, social context works greatly on young audiences' reception in American · TV series/serials. The context incorporates not only an economic one, but more importantly, a cultural one. Audiences' own identities, along with these social contexts, will work together in altering the audiences' reception for certain content. The thesis is not free from limitations, which is listed at the end of the text. Given more time, adding more qualitative interviews to deepen the obtained results from the quantitative responses, and adding more control in questionnaire retrieval process, I believe this research would go further in where it aims to go. However, since there is so far not any empirical study concerning Chinese college students' reception for American TV series/serials, this research still hopes to contribute a bit to the reception studies framework within a Chinese context. Future exploration could be oriented to cross-cultural reception studies, which expect to find more diversity within different social context.