| Summary: | 碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 新聞學系 === 104 === Discovery Communications Inc., which identifies itself as producing high-quality, informative television shows, creates unique nonfiction television programs in the global television market. This type of channel is novel, but its influence upon the audience is great. Because of its professional and intellectual image, Discovery Channel is often referred to as the sources of authentic information; however, there has been little domestic research about the types of nonfiction-television-program viewers. Therefore, this study, based on the perspectives of Discovery Channel's audience, aimed at studying the nonfiction-television-program audience's viewing motivation, behavior and their life styles, and furthermore, at having a general understanding of the current audience ratings of Discovery Channel programs, in hope of providing reference resources for future academic research and practices of related television programs.
The structure of the survey, with which the study was carried out, was developed from viewer behavior, motivation and life style theory. While the study employs the survey analysis method, it was conducted primarily through surveys on the Internet. In order to strengthen the weakness of Internet survey, which makes it difficult to gather opinions from higher age groups, the paper survey was made for them for investigation. The survey includes four categories: viewer behavior, viewer motivation scalograms, life style scalograms, and demographic variables. The survey length was from November 26, 2015 to December 07, 2015, and a total of 740 questionnaires were sent out, with 725 valid questionnaires retrieved.
The research results show that within Discovery Channel series, most of the audience watched Discovery Channel, the second popular channel was Travel & Living Channel, with the third popular one being Animal Planet. Besides, the audience viewing behavior shows significant differences between demographic variables such as gender, age, current living areas, and marriage status. The results further suggest that the audience who watched different channels demonstrated significant differences of life styles and viewing motivations, which meant different life styles and viewing motivations affected the audience's choice of television programs. As a result, audiences with different life styles were watching different television channels.
On the other hand, the results also suggest that variables of viewing motivations and life styles were only modestly positively correlated, which shows that while audience's viewing motivations were correlated with their life styles, the correlation was not strong. It might be explained that besides their life styles, there were certain other factors that influenced audience's motivation to choose which channels to watch, or it may have to do with the decreasing ratio of people watching television nowadays.
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