The following are some specific methods you could employ in conducting a media ethnography. For the Final Task for this module, you will be asked to conduct a small-scale, focused analysis of one participant (a friend, spouse, relative) engaged with a media text (a TV program, video, computer game, magazine, radio program), a chat room or fan club, or a virtual world (theme park, casino, computer simulation game). In reading over these methods, think about how you might conduct this study using these methods.

Selecting topics for research and posing questions

To select a study topic, students discuss their own experiences with responding to different types of texts, listing questions about their experiences that intrigue them. For example, one group of students had a strong interest in responding to radio. They recalled their own experiences listening to the radio, noting their preferences for certain stations, disc jockeys, and talk-show hosts. They also discussed the situations in which they listen to the radio — driving to school, doing their homework, exercising, etc., and purposes for listening — to be informed or entertained, to break up the monotony, to vicariously participate in a talk show, to be a loyal fan and listen to a sports broadcast, etc. And, they noted perceptions of others’ experiences — the fact that certain of their friends listened to those stations that only play certain kinds of music or that other friends enjoy listening to certain talk-show hosts in order to ridicule or parody these hosts. They then posed some questions: which programs do what types of groups listen to and why, what aspects of the programs are appealing, in what types of social contexts do listeners share their responses, how do these responses serve to build social bonds, and how do their beliefs and attitudes shape their responses. All of this helped them formulate questions about these different aspects of the response experience.

Adopting an “outsider” perspective

Understanding audiences as a micro-culture requires students to adopt an “outsider” Martian perspective who begins to perceive their familiar world as suddenly strange. Students may practice adopting a Martian perspective by going out as teams to different restaurants, stores, athletic events, classrooms, ceremonies, etc., and recording their observations of peoples’ behavior, language, and appearance. They are then asked to adopt a Martian perspective and interpret of the meaning of these phenomena as if they were alien strangers who had no prior knowledge to explain people’s behavior. To understand group behavior, students discern norms and conventions that constitute appropriate behavior for a group or institution. As an “outsider,” they are more likely to be able to define these norms and conventions than an “insider.”

In some cases, students are members of the group they are studying. In assuming this role of a participant/observer, students need to reflect on how their own relationship towards that group — as an “outsider” or “insider,” shapes their perceptions of the group. As an “outsider,” they may not be familiar with a group’s inner-workings and routines. They may therefore want to use a “cultural broker” who helps them gain access to the group. On the other hand, as an “insider,” they may be a fish in water, and may have difficulty standing back and assuming the Martian stance required to perceive the group as a micro culture. They may therefore want to share their perceptions with someone who was not familiar with the group. Ideally, students should embrace both of these perspectives by experiencing what it is like to be a group member and by standing back to assume a spectator stance.

Observing groups

Students then select certain groups for observation. They may observe previously formed groups such as classes, computer newsgroups, or book clubs. Or, they may create their own groups, asking students to share their responses with each other. One consideration is easy access to groups. Given the usual practice of a group of students renting a video, students may ask their friends to share their responses to the video. Or, students may want to study their younger siblings’ response to television because they can observe and interview their siblings in their own home (for examples of ethnographic studies on children’s responses to television, see Buckingham, 1996, and Palmer, 1986). In either case, students should ask group members for permission to study them, explaining the purpose of the study, describing the methods employed, giving them the right to withdraw from the study, and guaranteeing them that their confidentiality will be protected in written reports.

In using written field notes and tape-recordings of group discussions, instead of vague, evaluative comments such as “friendly,” “outgoing,” “talkative,” “emotional,” etc., or abstract summaries, students need to use concrete descriptions of behaviors — “Daryl, the smallest boy in the group, began to talk very quickly and excitedly when he described his feelings about the story ending.” They record in the margins the time of day and the beginning and end of certain activities — the fact that people move from one activity to the next. In reviewing back over their notes, they look for recurring patterns or frequencies of behavior, treating their perceptions as a jigsaw puzzle in which certain pieces fall together in certain ways.

In writing notes, students focus on a number of aspects:

• setting — sensory aspects of the setting or context. Students map which types of persons sit next to whom; for example, in a classroom, certain students may sit in the back of the room while others sit in the front.

• people — the particulars of persons’ behaviors, dress, hair style, gestures, and mannerisms as well as identifying them according to their gender, class, race.

• talk/conversation — recording aspects of the talk/conversations, noting certain words or phrases that are repeated, who talks the most versus least, and certain turn-taking patterns. You also need to be careful instudying children’s talk about media texts such as their television viewing

• documents, photos, writings — documents, photos, or writings from the people they are observing. For example, members of a fan group may have written letters to a their idol or collected magazine articles about that person.

• art work/hypermedia — audiences may also express their responses through images, graphics, cut-out figures, or hypermedia computer productions as tools for rewriting texts, parodying texts, or creating new versions of texts. Students also construct hypermedia responses to texts using images, photos, video clips, or songs to construct Web-based hypertext responses to stories about love, family, and peer relationships (see examples at Teen Issues) (Beach & Myers, 2001; Myers & Beach, 2001). Analysis of seventh graders’ hypermedia responses to poetry found that students used images, clips, songs, or other texts as iconic signs to simply illustrate the poem’s meaning by, for example, selecting an image that illustrated the poem (McKillop & Myers, 2000; Myers, Hammett, & McKillop, 2000). In other cases, they selected texts, which, when juxtaposed with the poem, created a new third meaning that served to extend or interrogate the poem’s meaning.

• social uses of media — how group members are using the media for certain social purposes — developing relationships, impressing each other, defining status, etc. For example, male adults may attempt to dictate television program selection for a family, in some cases, by not letting others have the remote control (Morley, 1986). Other studies find that parental authority may be challenged by children’s or adolescent’s own selection of music, programs, or Internet sites as a way of defining their own sense of independence (Moores, 1993).

Retelling, rewriting, or creating different versions

Another technique involves having participants retell, rewrite, or create their own version of a particular television show, genre, or film script or narrative. These alternative versions may then reflect participants’ attitudes and discourses through their choices of certain types of character actions, story development, types of conflicts, or resolution of conflicts. For example, Elizabeth Bird (2003) asked groups of adults living in the Duluth, Minnesota area to construct a fictional television series of any genre and in any setting in which they had to select a cast of characters, develop history of those characters, a detailed story for the first episode, and describe some of the events for later episodes. The only restriction that she gave the groups was that at least one character should be White; one, Native American, and one, a female. The groups who worked on this project varied in terms of their membership related to gender and race (Native American versus White). She then analyzed their material in terms of the groups representations of Native Americans and Whites.

Bird found that the White participants created stories that reflected their own mainstream cultural experiences—their White characters were similar to their own experiences, while they had difficulty developing complex Native American characters or placing those characters into the storylines. (Even though the Whites living in Duluth are near a large reservation, they rarely interact with Native Americans.)

In contrast, the Native American participants created quite different versions that reflected their attitudes and experiences. Their versions highlighted the experience of being an outsider as well as portraying Native American characters in heroic roles, contrary to popular media stereotypes. Their Native American characters often angrily rejected media stereotypes of Native Americans.

These contrasting versions suggested to Bird that these participates brought a particular cultural perspective and tool kit that reflected their own limited experiences in their often insular worlds:

For most White Americans, to live in a media world is to live with a smorgasbord of images thatreflect back themselves, and offer pleasurable tools for identity formation. American Indians, like
many other minorities, do not see themselves, except as expressed through a cultural script they do not recognize, and which they reject with both humor and anger. (p. 117).

For further reading:

Cornis-Pope, M., & Woodlief, A. (2002). The rereading/rewriting process: Theory and collaborative, on-line pedagogy. In M. Hebmers (Ed.). Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, K. (2002). Divergence in retelling a soap episode.

Photography as a research tool

Photography has become an important tool for use in capturing audience participation. (For further information on using images/photography as part of research, see Pink, 2001). As part of her study of the production of Super Bowl XXVI held in Minneapolis, Dona Schwartz (1998) examined the uses of photography as a tool within the activity of constructing the Super Bowl as a corporate and media extravaganza both for the actual participants and for television viewers. On the one hand, both still and television photography was being used by the Super Bowl promoters and publicists as a public relations tools to glamorize the Super Bowl as a significant event in American society. On the other hand, within the context of her own study, Schwartz worked with a team of photographers to capture a more realistic, behind-the-scenes portrayal of the less glamorous, ironic side of this media event. Her study report therefore used photos of department store mannequins wearing football helmets or a group of Native Americans protesting the Washington Redskins’ logo to represent the “behind-the-scenes” political issues associated with this media event. For photos from her study: Contesting the Super Bowl.

Bonnie Nardi and Brian Reilly, Apple Research Laboratories, Interactive Ethnography: Digital Photography at Lincoln High School

Donna Schwartz also has a very interesting site described as Picture Stories, a site designed to illustrate the uses of digital photography in conducting ethnographic research.

On this site, you will find photos and interviews from studies of animal rights demonstrations, Twin Cities strip bars, and a fiddle concert.

In her analysis of Disney World, Karen Klugman, a professional photographer, observed that most visitors were carrying cameras and that they were constantly taking pictures (The Project on Disney, 1995). She was intrigued by the fact that people were taking pictures of what was an artificial environment. She explained this as reflecting a need “to preserve the magic . . . the notion that what is represented in their pictures is reality itself and not some fiction framed by technology” (p. 24). Klugman’s own photos in the book portray bored, tired visitors or the artificiality of Disney World.

An ethnography of camera clubs

Mothers

Using Still Photography in ethnographic research

Visual Ethnography: use of photography to conduct ethnography

Females’ use of photography to explore their lives in school

Projects created by the Street-Level Youth Media project in Chicago: portrayals of their own lives

Use of digital photography in a high school ethnography

PowerPoint: media ethnography completed by elementary school students:

Beech Mountain Elementary School Media Ethnography
Advertising in Bethel Elementary School
The Perception of Color

Interviewing

One important phase of a study involves interviewing group members about their responses. Interviews provide an understanding of individual group members’ own personal perceptions of the influence of the group on their own responses. For example, a group member may have said very little about a text in a group discussion, but talked extensively about the same text in an interview.

The following are some interview questions that were used in a study of seventh graders’ responses to stories in an on-line computer chat exchange using the program Aspects (Beach & Lundell, 1997). One advantage of having students use a chat program is that it produces a print-out transcript that can serve as the basis for follow-up interview questions. In this study, students were asked to read through their group’s transcript and to “think-aloud” their reactions to the transcript. They were also asked to respond to the following interview questions regarding their group participation:

How do you feel about participating in these conversations? Do you feel comfortable participating? How does receiving a lot of comments that are not in order affect you? Recalling the first time you’ve participated, how have you changed? Does your participation seem more or less like engaging in an oral discussion?

When you’re receiving a lot of different messages about different things, how do you decide on what to respond to?

How did you feel like when no one responded to you? When you don’t get a reaction, what are you thinking?

How do you interact face to face in an oral discussion group? How does this different from your participation in the computer group?

What social roles do you usually play in the classroom or in your peer group? What role do you see yourself playing in these computer groups?

It is also important to recognize the limitations of interview questions, which can direct or limit responses in particular directions (see Oatey, 1999, for a discussion of these limitations).

For further reading:

Fontana, A. & Frey, J. H. (2000). The interview: From structured questions to negotiated text. In N. Denzin, & Y. Lincoln (Eds.). Handbook of qualitative research(pp. 645-672). Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage.

Spradley, J. (1997). The ethnographic interview. New York: Thomson.

Focus groups

You can also gain useful information by using focus group responses in which several participants share their perspectives and experiences in a discussion facilitated by you. One advantage of focus group responses is that individual members’ talk often triggers others’ similar responses. And, if participants agree or disagree on their perceptions, you gain some sense of a shared consensus of opinion, as opposed to a lack of consensus.

Suter, E. (2000). Focus groups in ethnography of communication: Expanding topics of inquiry beyond participant observation. The Qualitative Report, 5 (1 & 2).

Analyzing the results

Once they have collected observations, recordings, and information about a group and its members, students then analyze the meaning of these results.

• Norms/conventions

  A central focus of the analysis is to discern certain norms or conventions constituting appropriate practices involved in responding to a media text. For example, learning to play a computer game or learning to navigate through a hypertext novel involves learning to attend to cues implying rules or conventions operating in that game or novel. Chat room participants also adhere to rules of “netiquette” constituting appropriate topics, modes of decorum, and civility. Hamilton (1999) found that the Nancy drew chat room formulated explicit rules discouraging users from providing full names or using “bad words.” Chat rooms may also follow certain implicit rules regarding appropriate topics. Judy Ward (1996) studied 35 computer newsgroup participants’ responses to the television program, X-Files. She found that there were certain unspoken rules regarding inappropriate posting such as included making irrelevant, off-topic statements, bashing or spreading false rumors about the two celebrity stars of the show, positing sexually explicitly or violent messages, or misusing the newsgroup. When a participant began spreading false rumors about the female star of the show, she was immediately castigated and told “‘either get with it and get some netiquette or please keep your computer turned off’” (p. 8).

  Members gained status in the group by making frequent postings; by being affiliated with the program; by meeting one of the stars, by selling magazines, scripts, autographs, or t-shirts; or by sharing videos of programs. They also gained status by making intertextual links between the program and other television programs. The practices reflect the value group members place on assisting each other as group members. They also seek out verification of their feelings, asking each other if “‘someone feels this way’” or “‘am I the only one who feels bad.’” Based on her analysis of the group members’ adherence to certain norms and conventions, Judy inferred that “alt.tv.x-files is a micro culture with its own genre of literature, myths, and mores, embedded in larger cultures of paranoia and distrust of big government and a general fan culture which becomes deeply connected to entertainment icons.”

• Codes

Viewers or readers accept, resist, or negotiate these codes based on their object or purpose for viewing or reading, object or purposes related to their ideological stances or discourses. In a study of responses to the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Laurel Davis (1997) found that readers differed in their reactions due their stances relative to the codes of gender and sexuality associated with the portrayal of female models in swimsuits. She found that the producers perceived the issue as primarily serving to provide a non-sexual portrayal of current swimsuit fashions. Some readers responded by accepted this invited stance, stating that they read the issue simply to acquire information about swimsuits, what Hall (1980) defines as taking up or accepting the codes endorsed by the producers. However, most male readers responded in terms of the sexual appeal of the models. These males frequently referred to the influence of male peer pressure in social contexts to adopt the stance that being attracted to sexual representation of females is a marker of male heterosexuality. This male peer pressure in turn influenced their public endorsement of and positive response to the swimsuit issue. Davis (1997) quotes one male participant description of this peer pressure:

A lot of [young male athletes] kind of go with the flow, you know, peer pressure. . . Cause, like, their friend’ll open up the magazine and show them a girl and they’ll say, ‘You don’t like this girl? Oh, man, what’s wrong with you? You should like this girl,’ and that kind of thing. And the kid might not even like girls, you know. So, it’s like peer pressure . . . all around” (p. 52).

In other cases, females responded critically given their resistance to the sexist portrayals of women, an opposing or resistant stance (Hall, 1980). Davis cites a female who objected to the larger “codes of beautification” she perceived operating in the issue that:

. . . shows how American society views women, as to how they should be and how they should look and they should act and what they should wear . . . I mean, they’re supposed to look glamorous and sexy. And, I’m not. I don’t like to be portrayed that way at all . . . When I look at those magazines, it’s like, ‘I’m supposed to be this way?’ And [this image] is so popularized . . . slim figure, not a stomach, long legs, and you know the rest” (p. 82).

This study suggests that both males and females adopt a range of different positions associated with their particular needs or purposes for reading the swimsuit issue. Rather than adopting the essentialist perspective that males and females respond differently, students therefore need to examine the range of different subjectivities associated with gender portrayals in the media.

Media ethnographers are interested in how the discourses operating within an activity or social context shape viewers’ or readers’ responses to a media text (Beach, 1997). As Rose and Friedman (1997) posit, “while the discourses of film and television construct preferred positions for the spectator, each viewer is always simultaneously interpolated by a number of discourses (cultural, institutional, personal) which define him as a subject and have an impact on his reading of any text” (p. 12). In a study of viewers’ responses to the evening soap opera program, Dallas, Katz and Liebes (1987) found that viewers in American, Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia generated quite different responses to the same programs, differences reflecting different discourses or ideological perspectives. The Americans and the Israelis interpreted the characters’ actions in terms of various psychological needs and themes. The Russians interpreted the characters’ actions in terms of thematic beliefs. The Saudi Arabians interpreted the characters in terms of moral issues associated with family values. These different groups of viewers therefore constructed meanings of Dallas consistent with their own ideological orientation.

Viewers may prefer to view programs consistent with their own ideological predispositions. A study of twenty-five elderly females representing a range of different socio-economic groups who were fans of the program, Murder, She Wrote, found that the women responded positively to the familiar, predictable storyline whose values were consistent with their own (Riggs, 1998). At the same time, there was some variation in their responses due to differences in class background. The upper-middle class women identified strongly with the Angela Lansbury character, whom their valued for her independence. These women also enjoyed participating in the problem-solving processes inherent in the plot development. A group of African-American women responded more to the program’s portrayal of anxieties about youth and crime in their own urban setting. Thus, despite the similar, ritual-like participation with the program, there were distinct differences in their responses that represented differences their own purposes for viewing.

In contrast to these therapeutic discourses, the largely male sports talk-show is constituted by a discourse of masculine gender identity that values sharing of technical expertise about players, rules, and “stats” (Sabo & Jansen, 1998). Participants also celebrate the value of competitiveness and hard work, and generally avoid topics related to emotional, interpersonal matters associated with the "feminine or adopt certain identities. In their analysis of the discourses constituting television sports, Rose and Friedman (1997) found that male viewers often experienced a “distracted, identificatory, and dialogic spectatorship which may be understood as a masculine counterpart to soap opera’s ‘maternal gaze’” (p. 4).

Another discourse shaping viewers’ and readers’ activity is that of socio-economic class. In her study of the television viewing practices of retired persons living in an upscale retirement home, Karen Riggs (1998) found that the largely upper-middle class residents of this home selectively watched certain programs in order to be able to share their responses with other residents. Riggs describes their viewing practices:

A man watches PBS’s concert with the world’s most famous tenors not because he particularly enjoys it but because he knows his dinner companions the next day will consider it worthy of discussion. A women switches on Larry King Live in the evening because her neighbor mentions that she has read somewhere that attorney general nominee Zoe Baird will take phone calls from the public.” (p. 95)

The residents preferred programs such as documentaries on PBS that provided them with a larger, global perspective on social and political issues. They perceived themselves as concerned, informed citizens who wanted to maintain an active involvement in both the retirement community and in national political affairs. They treated their viewing as an active investment of their time in acquiring useful information as opposed to passive consumption of television.

Programs that appealed to these viewers could be “characterized by an aesthetic element of ‘class’ that attracts the Woodglen residents. The urbane people on these programs use language well, display critical thinking skill, approach events and issues with a degree of emotional distance, and otherwise signify affluence” (p. 64). Drawing on Herbert Gans’ notion of a “taste public,” Riggs perceived the residents as a “taste public” “that exercises certain values with regard to cultural forms such as music, art, literature, drama, criticism, news and the media [that appeals to an] overlapping high and upper-middle-class taste culture occupied by Woodglenners [that] privileges the elite forms of television, such as Masterpiece Theater, as well as what Woodglenners take to be ‘serious’ nonfiction content” (pp. 64–65).

• Analysis of text features

In conducting media ethnographies, students may also describe the particular aspects of texts that evoke or invite certain responses. As part of his study (included in the Appendix) of college females’ responses to “Christian” romance novels, Timothy Rohde (1996) analyzed the plot development of 110 mail-order, evangelical novels. He found that these novels contained few references to sexuality, a marked contrast to recent Harlequin and Silhouette romance novels. For evangelical Christians who objected to the trend towards “steamier” romance novels, these Christian romance novels published by the Heartsong Press provided a more “pure” alternative. In contrast to the typical romance novel plot development (Christian-Smith, 1993; Radway, 1984), the Heartsong romance novel heroine initially expresses doubt in her faith. She then meets a “good man,” whom she believes is not a Christian. She then experiences a conversion, removing her doubt in her faith. The heroine is then rescued from peril by the man, and she learns of his true nature as a Christian. It is only after they marry that they have sex. While the romance novel is designed to celebrate women’s role as a nurturer who transforms a more impersonal hero into a more caring person (Radway, 1984), the Heartsong novels are designed to be more didactic and morally uplifting, serving to reify readers’ allegiances to evangelical Christian beliefs.

A group of women whom Rohde interviewed responded positively to these novels’ “pure” subject matter and plot development. These readers believed that they did not have to be concerned about being “‘on guard’ when reading these novels.” Some preferred the historical Heartsong novels because they were set in a past perceived to be less corrupt than the current period. They also responded positively to the novels’ didactic messages, noting that “reading these books helped them to grow in their faith as they learned the same spiritual lesson the heroine did.” Rhode’s analysis of these novels’ characteristics helped him explain his participants’ responses. This suggests that students, in conducting their media ethnographies, may benefit from linking descriptions of specific aspects of texts to their participants’ responses.

• Final reports

In writing up results, students could present those results in a multi-media format using PowerPoint, Hyperstudio, or a Web-based format that allows them to present texts, images, sounds, quotes, and analyses in a hypertext, interactive format. In doing so, students can capture and portray their own experiences of a media texts for other audiences.

Students could also reflect on what they learned about their own identities and attitudes as both participant and researcher in conducting a study, particularly about their presuppositions and whether those presuppositions were validated in doing their study.

Module 8: Word document

Active Audience Response in a Media Culture

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnographies

Methods for Conducting Media Ethnography Studies

References