The Media Group at the CCCS selected the BBC television current affairs programme Nationwide to study the encoding/decoding model, a part of reception theory, developed by Stuart Hall.
This study was concerned with "the programme's distinctive ideological themes and with the particular ways in which Nationwide addressed the viewer".
Black college students, however, "fail[ed] to engage with the discourse of the programme enough to reconstruct or redefine it".
[2] The initial conclusion was that decodings cannot be traced solely to socioeconomic position, since members of the sample occupying the same class location produced different readings.
However, Sujeong Kim's statistical re-analysis of the project's findings suggests that this may be an underinterpretation: according to Kim, the results show that 'audience's social positions ... structure their understandings and evaluations of television programmes in quite consistent directions and patterns.