A CASE STUDY IN GROUNDED METHODOLOGY

A CASE STUDY IN GROUNDED METHODOLOGY

In order to illustrate the theoretical argument concerning a broadly ethnographic approach to the media audience—though one that both expands the definition of ethnography and reconstructs the definition of the audience—we offer now a brief account of the methods employed in our current project, “The household and the domestic consumption of information and communication technologies” (see Morley and Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone et al., 1989; Silverstone et al., 1990a, 1990b, for fuller accounts of this research in progress). Our concern here is not with the substantive “findings” of the research, but with explicating the rationale for the particular methodological choices we have made as this study has progressed. Overall, the study involves detailed work with twenty different families concerning the range of information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in their homes.

The research is designed to explore the fine grain of the relations between domestic culture and the uses of ICTs, among which we include pre-eminently the television, the VCR, the telephone, and the computer. The task is both deceptively simple and terribly ambitious: to understand how families in households live with these technologies and how they are incorporated into their domestic lives. Our premise has been (Morley and Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone, 1990) that television should not be studied in isolation, neither from other technologies nor from the structures of family life. We wanted to understand the processes and dynamics involving families, media, and technologies as systems, both intrinsically (with regard to the internal structure of family life) and extrinsically (with regard to the relations between families, neighborhoods, work, and kin-based networks of friendships and other relationships in the wider society). We were interested to study ICTs as integrating or isolating families and households into or from the world beyond their front door, as well as the role of ICTs in mediating the public and private spheres.

The methods have emerged and evolved as a result of a dialogue with the subjects and subject of the research, the methods themselves being grounded (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) in the activity of research. Likewise, we have attempted not just a multiple triangulation, but also a kind of reflexivity through which the methods would complement each other when subjects comment on the research process and on their own involvement in it as it progresses. Each of

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the inputs has a specific function in the research; each also has a secondary reflexive or triangulatory significance in the construction

of the overall “methodological raft” 2 on which the research process is placed. In the first stage of the research (with the first four of the twenty families) our principal commitment was to participant observation supplemented by time-use diaries, focusing on one family at a time. The participant observation, in particular, aimed to provide a plausible and coherent account of family life which went beyond the limitations of the self-reporting techniques employed in much previous audience research. However, it also became apparent that this approach would not readily provide either the basis for a systematic analysis of the key issues of media use or a secure enough basis for any systematic comparative work between families. Nor would it enable us satisfactorily to contextualize families historically and geographically in relation to their pasts, their futures, and their neighborhoods—within time and space relations.

With respect to participant observation, we concluded that, while it was a necessary component of the overall methodology, it was not a sufficient source of data. It did, however, supply valuable data, not only in terms of our observation of the people concerned, but also in terms of our observation of the household’s aesthetic and domestic culture as expressed in the furnishing of the rooms to which we had access. Finally, participant observation offered a continuing and necessary check on family members’ own accounting of domestic relations and technology use, thus providing one of the many levels of triangulation in the study.

In recognition of these limitations, we redesigned our methods to supplement participant observation with a number of further research inputs. In the first place, we began to give more weight to the time- use diaries, because this record of activities which we could not directly observe (either because they took place outside the home or when we were not present), offered us both an extension of our data set in space and time and a valuable and reflexive basis for interviews with each family member. The time-use diary provided a framework for understanding domestic temporality.

However, we needed an equivalent method to approach the spatial relations of the household. We therefore introduced a “mental mapping” exercise in which each member of the household was asked to draw a map of the internal space of the house and all its rooms.

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Initially this had the purpose of supplying us with information on those rooms to which we did not have direct access. However, it soon became clear that this technique offered valuable data in quite another way, since respondents’ maps differed, often quite considerably, in respect of the presence, absence, or significance of the different ICTs in their homes. This mapping exercise was supplemented by the use of two network diagrams which each household was asked to complete, showing their geographical and affective distance from relatives and friends as well as showing the modality (from letter writing to face- to-face interaction) of the communication process through which each relationship was principally sustained.

These techniques have allowed us to complement our participant observation and thus to contextualize our observational findings in more meaningful ways. At the same time, we have also developed a technique for contextualizing our observational work with reference to the family’s past. Thus, in each family we have organized a “viewing” and discussion of the family’s photograph album(s) (or video-tape collection of the family) which makes the family’s image of its own “story” or history available to us.

Taken together, these and other interview-based research inputs (for an extensive discussion, see Silverstone et al., 1990b) have allowed us to contextualize our participant observation and to triangulate the findings of one procedure against others. Together the inputs offer, we suggest, both the richness of a participant observation study and the rigor of systematically comparative analysis. For us, ethnography is a multifaceted process in which the requirements of detail and richness, rigor and systematicity, have to be carefully balanced, and where there is no single adequate methodological procedure.