Reading Realism: Audiences' Evaluations of the Reality of Media Texts

Forty-seven young adults participated in a series of focus group interviews designed to investigate how audiences conceptualize media realism. Contrasts in the way realism was defined and applied in the interviews and explicit statements by the participants supported previous findings that realism perceptions are multidimensional. The participants' discussions encompassed 6 distinct means of evaluating the realism of media texts: plausibility, typicality, factuality, emotional involvement, narrative consistency, and perceptual persuasiveness. Plausibility was the most readily discussed conceptualization. Different realism conceptualizations tended to be used for different media genres and the conceptualizations tended to focus on different features of the evaluated text. This article discusses the relationship of audience perceptions to scholars' conceptualizations and addresses implications for measuring media realism.