1. Proposed Title
The emotional response evoked in the female audience during the viewing of The Bold and the Beautiful.
2. Introductions and Orientation
The study of people 's interests in soap operas and their emotional link to them has been a long-standing fascination. Viewers across the globe, tune in daily to the likes of soap operas, such as The Bold and the Beautiful. According to studies done on soap operas by Pitout (2001: 348) the interwoven storylines "force" viewers to keep on watching to prevent them from missing out on that ever crucial scene, that can drastically change the entire story line. According to the recent publication of Screen Africa (2004:43) on the Audience Ratings (AR) of the South African television channels SABC 1,2 and 3 as well as M-NET, all of the highest-ranking programmes are soap operas and the highest ranking foreign programmes are Days of our lives and The Bold and the Beautiful. The AR for The Bold and the Beautiful for December 2003 was 12.29. It states that one rating point of all viewers represents approximately 145590 viewers.
The audiences are a crucial part in determining the success of a particular series. Since the study of audiences began, there have been many speculations regarding the influence of the media over its audience. According to Pitout (2001: 243), " In the early days of audience effects research there was the tendency to treat the media as "all-powerful" in determining the way audiences think and act". Early audience research was based on the perception that the audiences are passive receivers of the mass media message. This was supported by the hypodermic needle theory. However, this theory was developed for the audience analysis for radio and does not apply to television. As the research progressed, the two-step flow theory was developed in the 1950 's. J.T Klapper (1960) pointed out in Fourie 's chapter on The Effects of Mass Communication (Fourie, 2001: 295),
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