Leon de Stadler and Sarah van der Land[3] explore this type of approach in reference to a document produced by an organization that develops different kinds of interventions in the field of HIV/AIDS education.
As a result, the document, which used the informal slang of black South African youth, did not effectively communicate with its target audience.
After the dissemination of the document, Van der Land used focus groups and interviews of a sample of the target audience to discover what improvements should be made.
Holl concludes that knowing how to address an international audience is a vital skill that successful scientists, as well as technical communicators, must possess.
[6] There are often a large number of factors to consider, thus making it hard for the writer to completely assess the target audience within a reasonable amount of time.
The article pointed out that there are three main challenges that drive the search for methodological rigor: the difference between what people say they do and what they do in practice, the interpretation of the text by the reader, and why the received meanings of television matter in everyday life.
Their qualitative study involved 700 adult and adolescent participants who answered a structured questionnaire about prescription medication history and behaviors.
They conclude that latent analysis is a worthwhile addition to the analytical toolbox because it allows, in this case, risk reduction and hazard-mitigation efforts to tailor interventions to a diverse target audience.
[8] The population of older adults is growing, and Gail Lippincott asserts that technical communicators have not accounted for the needs of these audiences, nor drawn from the wide range of research on aging.
[9] Teresa Lipus[10] argues that devoting company resources to produce adequate instructions for international users is both practical and ethical.
She explains that because the potential for making subtle but offensive errors is so high in international dealings, a language-sensitive native speaker from the target culture should always review the instructions before they are distributed to consumers.
Although Lipus provides information in analyzing and writing for an international audience regarding consumer protection, the strategies offered can be applied to document preparation in general.
The information they gathered assisted the researchers in identifying and fulfilling specific audience needs, describing a framework, and presenting a case study in audience-driven Web design.
The survey informed the researchers that the audience would also like to experience a site with minimal graphics and short download times and one that is intuitive and easy to navigate.
A writer who perceives an audience as real tends to conceive of readers as living persons with specific attitudes and demographic characteristics.