Soap Opera Target Audiences

We needed as a group to discover who soap operas are aimed at we needed to consider such things as age and demographic groups, we really needed to find out a lot of information about soaps and what people expect from them so we created a questionnaire consisting of 10 questions that we asked a wide variety of age groups so that our results were not biased and we had a wide understanding of what people should expect from the soap opera genre.


Here is the Questionnaire which we handed out to people:


Audience Questionnaire




We asked these questions to ten people making sure we asked a wide variety of different aged people so we could get a wider understanding.


The results we obtained were:


What do you expect in general from this genre?


Reflection of everyday life- 6
Variation of story lines- 3
Touching on global or national problems-1

What settings would you expect to see from this genre?


Pub- 8
Houses-2
Cafe-5
Taxi service-1
Hairdressers-3
School-6
Park-5

Which storyline would you expect from a soap opera?


Affair-2
Marriage-2
Murder-4
Marriage-1
Death-1


What kind of lighting would you expect to see in a soap opera?


Natural-7
Dependent on setting-2
Artificial-1




What pitch music do you expect to hear in a soap opera?


Happy-3
Sad-2
Varies on storyline-5


What emotions do you expect to feel during a soap opera?

Depends on Story-7
Happy-1
Depression-0
Sorrow-2




What is your favourite soap?


Hollyoaks-1
Eastenders-5
Emmerdale-2
Coronation street-2


How old are you?


15-21  -4
21-30  -3
31-40  -1
41-50  -1
50+      -1


Are you Male or Female?

Male-5
Female-5




We took these results that we obtained from our questionnaire and analysed them so that we could use the information gained to know more about soap operas and what the audience expect from them.




Will Howlett & Alex Cockburn