THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

We all know from our everyday existence that the communication procedures of quotidian life can be deceptively complex, at times treacherously so. This is because of their vagueness, resulting from the absence of explication procedures between people who are already familiar with each other:

Much of our ordinary communication behavior…demands a certain amount of vagueness which further impairs [the researcher’s] ability to assess what is occurring and why. Ironically, vagueness is the arch villain of positivist science, where clarity and objectivity of interpretation are the embraced ideals. But vagueness is essential to daily patterns of social interaction. Without it, or worse, with the pursuit of scientific clarity, social interactions as we have come to know and experience them would

be nearly impossible. (Lindlof and Meyer, 1987:25)

By its very nature, ethnography attempts to explicate the (often unspoken) informal logic of communication and other everyday practices.

Qualitative research strategies such as ethnography are principally designed to gain access to naturalized domains and their characteristic activities. The strength of these approaches is that they offer a contextual understanding of the connections between different aspects of the phenomena being studied. Yet, as qualitative media researchers, we face the difficulty of finally telling stories about the stories which our respondents have chosen to tell us. These problems are both irreducible and familiar. As Geertz (1973:15) remarked, long ago, “we begin with our own interpretations of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to, and then systematize those.” The analyst’s account is, necessarily, an interpretation (and, notes Geertz, often a second- or third-order one).

However, as Geertz (1973) also suggests, rather than giving up and going home, the ethnographer’s alternative is to try to pick his or her way through the structures of inference and implication which

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constitute the discourse of everyday exchange. For the researcher to attempt to enter this natural world, where communication is vague and meanings implicit, is inevitably to go skating on thin ice. Nonetheless, corresponding claims can then be made in terms of data validity, since, unlike disaggregated forms of statistical knowledge, ethnography allows us to produce knowledge in contexts where the significance of the data can be more readily ascertained. Of course, we never simply describe a social setting, but necessarily interpret to make sense of our respondents’ words and actions in our research reports. Ethnographic accounts are essentially contestable, just as cultural analysis is a necessarily incomplete business of guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses.

Ethnographic analysis is dependent on various techniques of “triangulation” (see also Chapter 2 in this volume for a discussion of triangulation). Triangulation may involve “the comparison of data relating to the same phenomenon but deriving from different phases of the fieldwork, different points in the temporal cycles occurring in the setting, or, as in respondent validation, the accounts of different participants in the setting” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983:198). Ethnography’s characteristic use of multiple data sources thus guards against the risks of ecological invalidity which always pertain to any research method that is reliant on a single kind of data, posing the danger that the findings may turn out to be method-dependent. The multi-stranded character of ethnography, produced by different techniques (observation, interview, self-report, etc.), which can then

be systematically compared, is a further advantage of the ethnographic approach. To be sure, our knowledge remains partial, in more ways than one. In the case of research into the domestic consumption of television, access to the private sphere of the household is always a matter of degree; there will almost always be some areas of the household which are “forbidden” (see Bourdieu, 1972) to a stranger. Equally, as Anderson (1987a) notes, some social action will never be displayed in the presence of an outsider. The ethnographer’s account, then, must

be reflexive about its own partiality, incompleteness, and structured gaps. Whereas what we describe is not raw social discourse, to which we do not have full access, “this is not as fatal as it sounds, for…it is not necessary to know everything in order to understand something” (Geertz, 1973:20).

158 A handbook of qualitative methodologies