Qualitative audience research

From Driscollwiki

Seiter, E. (1999) "Qualitative audience research". Television and New Media Audiences. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Method problem: hard to see media in context of everyday life.

Argument: Usefulness of ethnographic methods for study of tv and computer use/viewing. Semi-structured and open-ended interviews.

Contents 1 Ethnographic method 1.1 Names 2 Mass comm (media effects, uses&grats), cultural studies influences 2.1 Uses & gratifications 2.2 British cultural studies 2.3 Audience studies departing from mass comm 2.3.1 Pushback from traditional social scientists 2.4 Names 3 Encoding / decoding 3.1 Names 4 Feminist studies of domestic contexts 4.1 Names 5 Bourdieu on television 5.1 Four forms of capital 5.2 Use by Fiske, Jenkins 5.3 Critique of Bourdieu 5.4 Empirical sociology 5.5 Names 6 Speaking subjects 6.1 Ethnomethodology 6.2 Focus on the unspoken 6.3 Problem of transcription 6.4 Names 7 Ethnography's other 7.1 Names

Ethnographic method

• Developed with anthro, socio
• Extended periods of participant observation
• Emphasizing descriptive writing
  • Field notes
  • Final ethnography
• High normative standards
  • Few media studies meet this standard
• Conventionally used to study culture "as a whole"
  • Audience studies usually focus on one aspect (e.g. TV)

"[Ethnographic fieldwork] is characterised by a multiplicity of data-gathering strategies, in a variety of contexts, drawing upon the experiences of a wide range of people over a long period of time." (Gillespie 1995) (As quoted here on 10)

Names

Anthropologists

• George Marcus
• Michael Fischer

Audience studies

• David Morley, London families, 86
  • Recognizes both uses&grats / British cultural studies as influences
• Janice Radway, romance novels, 84
• Ien Ang, Dallas fan letters, 85
• Ann Gray, home video, 87, 92
• Elihu Katz, Tamar Liebes, Dallas, 90
• Marie Gillespie, Punjabi youth, 95
  • Conducted in part as a HS teacher for 7 years
• Camille Bacon-Smith, Star Trek, 92
• Angela McRobbie, teen girls in Birmingham, 91

Mass comm (media effects, uses&grats), cultural studies influences

Uses & gratifications

• Audience studies grows "in part from the increased agency [...] in uses and grats" (11)
• Uses & grats, "a shift to more optimistic, less harmful characterization" (12)
  • Not a fundamental change to the effects paradigm but
  • A "evolution at the systems and individual levels" from "focus on communicator to audience"
  • Left behind: "untenable stimulus-response conception" of media effects
  • Lacked explicit social theoretical references for interpreting individual results
• Based on a "pluralist model" of society (12)
  • Something for everyone "on offer" in the media ecology
  • "Functionalist sociological model" focusing on the explanation of social stability
  • Lacks concern for the power relationships

British cultural studies

• Emphasis on encoding and decoding cultural texts
• Theories derived from
  • Semiotics (Eco)
  • Reader-response (Iser)
• Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Univ. of Birmingham, 1970s (12)
  • Nuanced investigation of television
  • Understanding audience activity through Marxist theories of "ideology"
  • Focus on "social power" (distinguishing it from uses & grats)
• Ethnographic methods borrowed as a result of critique of mass comm approaches
  • Especially behaviorism, institutional (funding) preferences for quant findings
  • Failure of mass comm to address reception and audience activities
  • Too much emphasis on observable behaviors rather than structures of meaning
• Mass comm studies frequently experimental in controlled circumstances (12)
  • Disconnect to everyday lived experiences

Audience studies departing from mass comm

• Projects tend to begin without a clear-cut hypothesis
• Multiple RQs investigated
• Departs from social science convention of scientific method
• Small sample sizes
  • Statistical generalizability sacrificed
• Case study rather than survey
• Findings presented as "extensive quotation"
  • Quantified findings stored in an appendix
• Research conducted through friendly interviews

Pushback from traditional social scientists

• Methodological problems
  • Lacks generalizability
  • Bias
  • Political "axe-grinding"
  • Failure to employ multiple methods
  • "Casual" or "sloppy" data collection
• Often carried out by academics trained in humanities rather than sciences
  • Literary crit, textual analysis, film theory
  • Rooted in Marxist, feminist theory
  • Semiotics, psychoanalysis
• In contrast, mass comm tended to receive social science or journalism training
  • Esp. Social psychology

Names

• Carl Bybee
• Umberto Eco, semiotics, 1976
• Iser, reader-response, 1978
• James Curran, frustrated that people reinvent the wheel, 1996

Encoding / decoding

• Focusing on different interpretations of the same programme by people across various socio-demographic groupings
• How people read television will be based on their own experiences
• "Creative" processes of interpretation ... "not generally observable in ... social science" (15)
• "Nuclear reactions" compare the reactions of different groups to the same programme
• Cosby study revealed extent to which interviewees anticipate interviewer intent, regulate responses
  • Focus groups lack context for respondents
  • A disconnect between "words and actions"
• "Women" included a variety of material but relatively uniform groupings
  • Restrained from making overbroad conclusions regarding the political efficacy of regulating TV content
• TV crit should deal more with "relevance/irrelevance and comprehension/incomprehension" rather than "acceptance/rejection" of ideology (21)
  • A need for the study of context

Names

• Stuart Hall, encoding/decoding
• David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, "Everyday television: Nationwide", 1978
• John Corner, Kay Richardson, Natalie Fenton, "Nuclear reactions", 1978
• Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, The Cosby Show/Enlightened Racism, 1992
• Philip Schlesinger, R. Emerson Dobash, Russel P. Dobash, C. Kay Weaver, "Women Viewing Violence", 1992

Feminist studies of domestic contexts

• Home as a place of
  • Leisure for men
  • Labor for women
• Media consumption is linked to gender roles
• Radway's "key informant", a bookstore employee (21)
  • Questionnaire invited some quant analysis
  • Examining reading from many vantages:
    • Radway's reading
    • Informants' reading
  • Includes analysis of publishing industry
    • Combining political economic and audience research
• Radway, Morley, Gray's work concerns more conventional nuclear working families
  • Behaviors, interviews, discussions
• In contrast, Ang and Hermes construct theory via Foucault, Lacan, Butler
  • Some textual analysis
  • Not fieldwork
• Why did the fieldwork methodology yield such different findings?
  • Need they have been "more intense"? (24)
  • Were they "methodologically essentialist"? (24)

Names

• Janice Radway, Reading the Romance, 1984
• David Morley, Family Television, 1986
• Ann Gray, Video Playtime, 1992
• Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital
• Ien Ang, Joke Hermes

Bourdieu on television

"...cultural consumption [is] predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not to fulfill a social function of legitimating social difference" (1984) (As quoted on 24)

• Studies of "taste"
  • Consideration for areas of pop culture formerly ignored in aca work

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." (1984) (25)

• Brundsdon, early adopter of Bourdieu, argues that soap operas require a certain "cultural capital" to appreciate (25)

Four forms of capital

• Economic
• Cultural: tastes, preferences, knowledge
• Social: durable network of relationships, mutual, recognized
• Symbolic: the previous three legitamated and institutionalized

Use by Fiske, Jenkins

• Celebration of the cultural capital required for viewing pop artifacts
• Bourdieu "explicitly opposed"
  • Believed that cultural capital needs be translated into social capital for material gain
• When critics wield fandom, they often do so in ways inaccessible to their informants

"Only the inheritors of legitimate culture ... can afford to keep quiet about the good and bad of television." (Brunsdon as quoted on 26)

• Pro-television researchers are "double access" audiences (27)
• "Ordinary people" have access only to "low" or "popular culture" (Jostein Gripsrud)
• Do "ordinary people" respect or accept the judgements handed down "from above"? Quoting John Hall on (27)

Critique of Bourdieu

• Universalizes the "quite specific social hierarchy of French Society" (27)
  • Americans may experience and create culture differently

Empirical sociology

• Believes fieldwork must complement theory
• "Reflexive sociology", includes "theory of intellectual practice" as "integral component and necessary condition" (28)

Names

• Bourdieu, Distinction, 1984
• Hobson, aca fan
• Jenkins, aca fan
• Bacon-Smith, aca fan
• Jostein Gripsrud, "double access"
• John Hall, questions relevance of "high" critics among "ordinary" people
• Michèle Lamont, Annette Lareau, contrast American culture to European

Speaking subjects

• Speech is primary point of entry for audience research
  • Requires theory of subjectivity, language
• Subjectivity, consciousness
  • Subject, the individual
  • May be "multiplicity of subjectivities (28)
• Language is not directly connected to intentions of speaker
  • A structured "prison" of expression
• Discourse in Foucault's terms limits what can even be said or known about a subject (28)
• What people say in studies cannot be taken at face value
• Media tastes do not reflect identity but (at least in part) constitute it

Ethnomethodology

• Conversation analysis
  • Recognizing structures governing an interaction
  • Sequencing
  • Terms
  • Spaces
  • Language

Focus on the unspoken

• Walkerdine, influenced by Lacan, Foucault
  • Focuses on the "gaps between desires and their expression" (30)
• Researchers need more time with subjects to "cope with silences" (30)

Problem of transcription

• Written transcription lacks context, body language, timing
• Addressed to some extent by audio/video recording
  • Record of non-verbal communication
• Weakness: time-consuming

Names

• Louis Althusser
• Jacques Lacan
• Foucault
• Valerie Walkerdine, psychologist
• Bob Hodge, David Tripp, Children and Television, 1986

Ethnography's other

• Ethnography's roots: colonialism
• Colonial representations "portray the cultural reality of others without placing [ones own] reality into jeopardy." (31)
• Who is the other in [television] audience studies?
  • Non-academics?
  • Less formally educated?
• Walkerdine includes autobiographical information to make transparent differences between informant and researcher
• Questions must be raised about sampling:
  • Predominantly from areas near to the university
  • Students enrolled in social science classes

Names

• James Clifford, critique of colonialism in ethnographic tradition