Date

12-7-2023

Department

School of Communication and the Arts

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Chair

S. Allison Brake

Keywords

audience engagement, Facebook, Netflix, streaming series, thematic analysis

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Film and Media Studies

Abstract

This qualitative study aimed to find the recurring themes amidst Facebook audience engagement of the Netflix drama series. The series sampling size was collected from Nielsen Ratings (2023) and Netflix’s (2022) top ten charts for three consecutive months from 11/4/2022-1/29/2023. Netflix was the most-watched streaming platform, with 80% of viewership, with drama being the most prevalent genre. The theoretical frameworks were medium and new medium theories. The Craig’s traditions were sociopsychological and sociocultural. The literature review expanded on the impact of the medium of streaming media, the binge-watching phenomenon, and genre studies. Five hundred ninety-one comments were manually scraped and coded from the five Facebook posts about both series, with the top 210 words analyzed and categorized into themes depicted through tables, word clouds, and pie charts. The overlapping thematic findings for the Facebook audience engagement from The Recruit and Kaleidoscope were narrative, audience emotion/opinions, and sub-thematic findings of binge-watching and anticipation for Season 2. Thematic findings for the Facebook audience engagement from The Recruit also included characters, genre, and sub-thematic findings of cliffhangers. Sub-thematic findings for Kaleidoscope also included a comparison to other series/films. The implications of this study on the entertainment industry, communication studies, and the relevance of streaming media were discussed in detail. Suggestions for future research involve replicating the methodology for participant studies on binge-watching.

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