ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

Morley (1980) has argued that the relation of audiences to television must always, in principle, be formulated as an empirical question, and that the significant challenge is to develop appropriate methods. In our current research, we have adopted a largely ethnographic approach, the prime requirement being to provide an adequately “thick” description (Geertz, 1973) of the complexities of domestic viewing.

According to Hammersley and Atkinson (1983:2), ethnography can

be understood as

simply one social research method, albeit an unusual one, drawing on a wide range of sources of information. The ethnographer participates in people’s lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions …collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues with which he or she is concerned.

At its simplest, it has been argued that the ethnographer’s task is to “go into the field” and, by way of observation and interview, to attempt to describe—and inevitably interpret—the practices of the subjects in that cultural context, on the basis of his or her first-hand observation

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of day-to-day activities. As Hammersley and Atkinson further argue, in this respect “there is no escape from reliance on commonsense knowledge and on commonsense methods of investigation. All social research is founded on the human capacity for participant observation” (p. 25). The researcher, being an active participant in the research process, is “the research instrument par excellence” (p. 18), and rather than “engaging in futile attempts to eliminate the ‘effects’ of the researcher, we should set about understanding them” (p. 17; see below on the consequent problems of interpretation and reflexivity in research).

Ethnographies, by their very nature, then, are grounded in the realities of other people’s lives, what Geertz calls the “informal logic of actual life” (1973:17). The problems of doing ethnography— problems of description and understanding—are those of social research as a whole. From a naturalistic perspective, participant observers aim to learn the rules of the culture (or subculture) of the people they are studying, and to learn to interpret events and actions according to those rules, whether implicit or explicit. From this perspective, the objective is not to identify universal laws, but rather to produce “detailed descriptions of the concrete experience of life within a particular culture and of the social rules and patterns which constitute it” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983:8).

Notes of caution are certainly in order here. First of all, self- consciousness (or reflexivity) is needed regarding the inevitable partiality of any analysis. Moreover, as Lull (1988b) argues, rigorous and systematic forms of data collection and interpretation are just as necessary in qualitative as in quantitative research. Lull notes that in audience studies of recent years, the term “ethnography” has become totemic (a ritual genuflection toward a newly instituted tribal deity?). Suddenly everyone is an ethnographer (the ethnographer as fashion victim?). Yet, as Lull points out, “what is passing as ethnography in cultural studies fails to achieve the fundamental requirements for data collection and reporting typical of most anthropological and sociological ethnographic research. ‘Ethnography’ has become an abused buzz-word in our field” (Lull, 1988b:242). Instead, Lull points to the particular responsibilities and requirements that attach to ethnographic practice. Once we invoke the importance of the context of actions and their embedding in the fabric of everyday life, as researchers we then operate under a specific set of responsibilities to do the following:

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(1) observe and note routine behavior of all types characteristic of those who are being studied, (2) do so in the natural settings where the behavior occurs, and (3) draw inferences carefully after considering the details of communication behavior, with special attention paid to the often subtle, yet revealing, ways that different aspects of the context inform each other.

(Lull, 1987:320)

The emphasis on the context of actions raises considerable problems concerning the delimitation of the field of research and of establishing which elements of the (potentially infinite) realm of an action’s context are going to be relevant to the particular research in hand. This returns us to the familiar debate about the relative advantages and disadvantages of open-ended and closed research strategies. An illuminating example is offered by Gray (1987) who, when researching women’s relations to video technology, found that very often the women she interviewed wanted to tell her stories (“their” stories) and that, at first, she was anxious lest they should be “getting away from the point” (their uses of video) in telling stories which often involved extended narratives of family history. However, as Gray herself suggests, the great value of this open-ended approach lay in the fact that in allowing respondents to “tell it their way” with a minimum of direction, she in return received their own understanding of their video (non-)use in the context of their own understanding of their social position. Whatever they might have said in answer to direct questions would have been relatively insignificant, as it was “how they saw their lives” that explained the extent to which they did or did not use the video technologies.

The issue is not only a pragmatic one, of which elements of the context are necessary to understand any given action. It is also a theoretical and epistemological question of the relation between the particular and the general, the instance and the category. Ang (1991) argues that, given the dominance of the generalizing/ categorizing tradition in much previous audience research and its acknowledged epistemological limitations, in, for example, the categorizations of “viewer types,” it is time for this emphasis to be complemented by the opposite concern with particularization (see also Billig, 1987). As Ang puts it (1991:160),

rather than reducing a certain manifestation of “viewing behaviour” to an instance of a general category, we might consider it in its particularity, treat it in its concrete specificity, differentiate it from

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the other instances of the general category…. Only then can we go beyond (statistical) “significance without much signification.”