Audience responses to environmental fiction and non-fiction films

Having been closely involved with developing a textual analysis strategy for examining ecology within Hollywood fiction, it has become necessary to test some of the hypotheses and assertions embedded in such analysis and explore how actual audiences perceive and decode ecocinema. Consequently in this small pilot study of communications students at Dublin City University, using pilot survey/questionnaires, discussion groups and the Q-methodology, we have tried to tease out the relative benefits and usage of such methods with the aim of producing some tentative findings, which will be explored and tested across further studies over the next few years. In particular this article focuses on comparing audience perspectives using non-fictional as against fictional evocations of an environmental agenda.