Empirical research, literature and film

Although validation criteria are not the same in different areas, in order to be taken seriously in a scientific community, professional observation of literature is expected to meet the same standards as all other scientific procedures. Projects that do not make their working procedures explicit are likely to be judged as being less credible: ways and tools of problem solving must be open to intersubjective inspection (Schmidt 1999, 2000). Empirical research allows us to try to understand changes taking place in different areas of communication. Book reading has shifted from a form of socialization, when books were commonly read aloud, a practice that was widespread in the whole of antiquity, to forms of solitary reading. This change is related to the spread of literacy and the availability of books at low cost. It is possible that at the beginning of the third millennium we are now witnessing a similar evolution in the use of films, due to the availability of technologies that make personalized film watching of films easy and inexpensive. Data were collected in order to study changes in film watching related to new viewing technologies.