Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding (British Film Institute, London, Bfi Television Monograph, No 11)

Morley conducted The Nationwide Project in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside Charlotte Brunsdon, which focused on media audiences. He undertook a frequent amount of research with various participants from various educational and occupational backgrounds. 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". This first part of the study was published by Brunsdon and Morley in 1978. Morley conducted qualitative research with various participants from different educational and occupational backgrounds. He observed different responses to a clip of its budget special to see whether they would construct dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings (the three categories of readings proposed by Hall)