Does Money Talk Equate to Class Talk? Audience Responses to Poverty Porn in Relation to Money and Debt

This chapter focuses on transcripts collected for the Benefits Street project at Sheffield Hallam University, which elicited audience responses to clips of poverty porn programming. We conducted four focus groups with members of the public from different social backgrounds across the north and Midlands of England and asked our participants what they thought of the representations of the working class that were shown on screen. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (specifically the use of semantic tagging software) and discourse analysis, we focus here on how our participants used terms associated with money and debt. Our analysis aims to ascertain whether talk of money in relation to benefits claimants actually equates to talk about their social class.