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The Audience in the Graduate Curriculum

Training Future Scholars

Meenakshi Gigi Durham

Audience research is not for the faint of heart. The study of media audiences calls for energy, courage, determination, patience, flexibility, people skills, a sense of humor, and a spirit of adventure. Most graduate students in media studies – indeed most media scholars – are aware of these requirements, which is perhaps why so few of us actually undertake it. But the rewards of audience work are unmistakable, particularly with regard to our understanding of the real-world implications of mediated messages. Media scholarship is meaningless without audience research.

The pioneers of our field were acutely aware of this. “It is in its discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place,” wrote Stuart Hall more than a quarter of a century ago. “Once accomplished, the discourse must then be translated – transformed again – into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.” He added forcefully: “If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect” (Hall, 1980, p. 128). Richard Johnson (1986/7) emphasized the vital links among production, text, and audience in his groundbreaking “circuit model” of culture. “The ultimate object of cultural studies is not, in my view, the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation,” he noted (p. 198). Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1974) argued that “media researchers ought to be studying human needs to discover how much the media do or do not contribute to their creation and satisfaction” (p. 30).

But audiences are complicated: their negotiations of media texts are varied, enigmatic, contradictory, cryptic. We need complex methods in order to gauge the intricacies of audience engagements with texts – methods that probe the subtleties of message decodings and the identity politics that might motivate them, whether the latter relate to class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or to the complex combinations and permutations of these and other life circumstances that might predict and explain what media messages mean.

By comparison, texts are easier. Texts are static: they are in online databases, or on microfilms in libraries, or in archives. They sit politely and await the researcher's arrival, and every time the researcher returns they are the same: they don't grow old, change their minds, sicken, or die. It is usually not difficult to gain access to texts: at the most, one might need a university identification card, a library card, or a letter of authorization in order to get to them. Texts don't object to the researcher's presence; they don't get cold feet and drop out of the study halfway through; they won't be traumatized by the research; and they won't sue the researcher later on.

Moreover, a researcher often doesn't need to get out of his or her chair to study a text, especially in this era of near-universal online access to documents. That's a tempting idea for many researchers who spend all their time in their chairs and at their screens anyway!

And, finally, there's a god-like element to analyzing texts: you are in control of interpreting them. Your analytical methods are geared to interrogating the patterns, juxtapositions, and structural elements that convey meaning, and using those methods allows you to conclusively explain the text's significance and impact.

Of course, audiences don't always read the texts the same way scholars do; and they don't read them as the text's producers do, either.

And there's the rub.

There would be no need of audience analysis if the media operated as a “magic bullet” and meaning were seamlessly transferred from producer to text to receiver, without any possibility of misapprehension. But slippages happen all the time: the car named “Nova” was seen by Latino audiences as one that wouldn't go (no va in Spanish); the Manson family found directives for murder in the Beatles' song “Helter Skelter”; the darkening of O. J. Simpson's face on the cover of Time magazine was viewed as racist by some readers, but not by others. The reinterpretation of media texts is a routine aspect of mediated communication, and in order to fully understand what the media mean in society, audience research is imperative.

Texts don't exist in a vacuum. They are, in a sense, alive: they connect with people in social circumstances in various ways; they are accepted, resisted, dismissed, rethought, adored; they motivate social action, policy, and legislation; sometimes they influence behaviors; sometimes they are derided as junk; sometimes they become iconic. We can't know about the social life of media texts unless we acknowledge that audiences are a crucial and dynamic element of the media system.

Confronting the System

It's challenging to convince fledgling scholars of these research imperatives. In-depth, qualitative audience work takes time to conduct – far more time than a quantitative analysis; and this fact results in longer times to graduation and in the need to extend the funding for such projects. These realities pose myriad bureaucratic obstacles, which both the students and the supervising faculty need to understand in order to facilitate more qualitative audience research in departments of communication and media studies. In anthropology or sociology departments, an extra year of funding, dedicated to fieldwork, may be built into doctoral programs, where the time demands and exigencies of ethnographic endeavors are more common and better understood. In order to foster media audience research, communication programs should also begin to see extended fieldwork as routine, and as a valued element. In communication programs, then, funds need to be set aside to offer longer term support to those students who will conduct field analysis; planning must be done with this recognition in mind. Alternatively, advisors can work with students to secure grant funding for such projects; federal, state, and local initiatives exist for ethnographic projects on topics salient to current government priorities. In addition, many universities are developing a growing commitment to globalization and to internationally focused research, so these initiatives may be tapped for support. Audience research does require more resources in order to be conducted, but finding funding sources is possible. Recently, a student on a master's degree course in our program at the University of Iowa conducted fieldwork in the Arctic among the Inuit people, cobbling together money from a variety of funding sources – some internal (such as a small research grant from the university's Student Government Association) and some external (a Fulbright scholarship) to stay in the Canadian Nunavut territory for several months (Gunderson, 2009).

Graduate faculties need to take such financial issues into consideration in their planning and budgeting, in order to conduct qualitative audience studies successfully. Second, university administrations need to be reminded that “time to degree” is not a valid or useful criterion in the evaluation of graduate programs. It is no secret that, at the University of Iowa, where I teach, many graduate programs are now in jeopardy: they are in danger of being eliminated as a result of a university-wide assessment that has used this factor (among others) as a criterion in judging graduate student success (Olsen, 2010; Task Force, 2010). But certainly disciplines requiring long-term fieldwork – anthropology, ethnomusicology, qualitative sociology, social work, and, yes, communication – must unite to explain to the administrative powers-that-be the irrelevance, and indeed the counterproductive nature of such a criterion. Long-term fieldwork produces the kind of rich, meaningful data that cannot be obtained in any other way, and it must be commended and supported.

Third, painstaking paperwork and protocols confront audience researchers. They range from following university procedures for “human subjects research” to securing permissions from potential study participants, from their institutional administrators, and sometimes from government entities. These preparatory measures have to be undertaken for the researcher's protection as well as for that of the subjects. Graduate advisors and dissertation chairs need to take time to help their students understand the necessity of these procedures and to assist these students in completing such tasks in a timely fashion. Interdepartmental collaborations, discussion groups, or other networking opportunities can help graduate students feel supported in these rather tedious and daunting endeavors. It's an extra effort, but the value of the research justifies the time that needs to be put in upfront.

It's easy to see that, for all the reasons outlined above, textual analysis offers a safe and stress-free haven to many graduate students. And confronting the challenges of audience research creates even more quandaries: how does one identify the audience? What constitutes a valid audience population, especially in qualitative inquiry? How does one initiate contact with such audiences, once they are identified? And, on top of all that, there's the specter of the university's Institutional Review Board, whose criteria have grown more draconian over time. So – is audience research really worth the hassle?

It's essential for media scholars of the future to recognize that it is. Media studies are incomplete without audience research. Moreover, fieldwork can be fun. Leaving the academic environment to venture into dormitory rooms, high school cafeterias, homeless shelters, newsrooms in Hawaii, call centers in India, or villages in Africa offers new experiences, exciting encounters, unexpected epiphanies, and opportunities for both professional and personal growth. It is my view that the best audience research requires immersion in often unfamiliar settings and situations. The outcomes of such research are incomparably rich, and they make invaluable contributions to the scholarship in our field. Thus this chapter will focus on qualitative, field-based studies of audiences because of their potential to yield nuanced, detailed, and in-depth understandings of how audiences negotiate the contemporary media-saturated environment.

Learning the Ropes

But scholars need to be meticulously trained to conduct good audience research, as the potential pitfalls are many, and the validity of the findings rests on the rigor of the researcher's methodological approach – both to data collection and to analysis.

Unfortunately, precious little training in audience research is offered in most graduate programs, in part because most graduate curricula call for only one or two methods classes – usually one “qualitative” and one “quantitative,” if the student is lucky (if not, the two are rolled into one quick overview that offers a week or two on survey methods and ethnographic fieldwork). But audience research really shouldn't be undertaken on the basis of such flimsy preparation. To conduct thorough, valid, and perceptive research on media audiences, students ideally need to be familiar with the major audience analyses in our field and to have a sound understanding of best practice in their chosen methods.

Training in research methods happens in an environment that tends to pay scant attention to graduate pedagogy; the teaching of graduate students is often left to intuition, mysticism, and serendipity. While manuals and handbooks on the topic of undergraduate college teaching abound, similar attention is seldom paid to the graduate classroom. Graduate students are often expected to absorb knowledge through a process of osmosis. This is a dangerous expectation in preparing students to conduct audience research. For ethnographic fieldwork in particular, the complexities and challenges are so great that adequate preparation is essential if sound evidence is to be collected; a great deal of time could be wasted if students are given short shrift regarding the study of audience cultures.

Teaching a graduate seminar in qualitative methods for the study of communication is a little like herding cats: there are so many issues to deal with, each of which is so complex and buttressed by so much scholarship, that trying to organize everything into a single term's syllabus is literally impossible. But basic topics can be raised, and students' appetites can be whetted for more explorations in ethnography. In teaching these seminars I try to include not only basic texts, but also more sophisticated and engaging ones, like Ruth Behar's The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Behar, 1996) – a reflection that has many resonances for the former journalists in my classes – or Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life (Boellstorff, 2008), a book that appeals to the many new media enthusiasts enrolled. Despite the shortness of a typical semester, I try to send students out of the classroom to conduct at least one quasi-ethnographic study; they return with field notes, recordings, and visual data that we then organize, parse, and interpret through the lens of the relevant theory – probably the most difficult part of any field investigation.

My preliminary exercises involve putting students in groups or pairs; generating a broad research question that is timely and topical (such as: “Are there age-related responses to ambient media in public spaces?”); and sending the teams out to conduct observations and take field notes. Entering the field may be tricky, but, once accomplished, it is usually enjoyable and stimulating. The teams can generate their own research strategies, combining participant observations with in-depth interviews; they bring their notes back to class and work on organizing, analyzing, and interpreting them theoretically. The team approach also allows for engaging issues of triangulations and validity in qualitative inquiry.

Dealing with the mass of field notes, recordings, and other documents accumulated during the course of a study is in fact the true test of the audience researcher. And of course there isn't just one way of collecting or organizing and interpreting field data. Discussions of the various ways in which one can make sense of qualitative information are a key aspect of any class in methodology. Again, the choices may be intimidating to a newbie – there is no formula to follow, as there would be in a quantitative study, where an ANOVA or a chi-square would present clearly defined steps that yield comfortingly empirical results. With field notes – as Wolf (1992) observed – we are dealing with “disorganized thoughts, detailed observations of minutiae, descriptions of rituals, transcripts of conversations, diagrams, and detritus” (p. 128), some of which can be discarded, some of which are treasures, and all of which call for nuanced and varied methods of analysis. In an introductory seminar the most one can do is to indicate the almost limitless approaches that can be used in the analysis of field data. Fortunately most universities offer more specialized classes, which will help students to hone their understanding of how to handle necessarily messy data – messy because, as Wolf (1992) puts it, “[e]xperience is messy [. . .] When human behavior is the data, a tolerance for ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and instability is essential” (p. 129). A broad knowledge of how to interpret and write up field notes can help students negotiate these trials.

I also direct students to classes on ethnography taught in other departments, notably anthropology, but sometimes in other, unexpected disciplinary units as well: at the University of Iowa, the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, an interdisciplinary program, periodically offers a seminar in feminist ethnography, while the English department regularly lists a graduate course focused on ethnographic writing. Eclectic and cross-disciplinary coursework of this kind will enrich a student's understanding of the multiple facets of immersive audience research.

In addition to classroom instruction, I'd suggest that one doctoral comprehensive exam should focus on theories of the audience, if the student plans to do audience research, because audience analysis has been a key element of our field for more than a quarter of a century now. It's important for students to know about the core developments in this area and to recognize the wealth of theoretical and methodological approaches that are possible, as they put together their research plans. From David Morley's The Nationwide Audience (1980) to Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) to Radhika Parameswaran's articles on feminist media ethnography in India (1999, 2001, 2002), from Elihu Katz and colleagues' (1974) work on uses and gratifications to John Fiske's ideas of the active audience (1989, 1993) and to Bella Mody's thoughts on audiences in developing countries (2010), there's a treasure trove of scholarly literature on the subject that illuminates the almost limitless possibilities of media audience research. The media audience scholar should read outside the field, too, as insights from anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies are vital to this research area.

From this literature, young scholars will learn that it's possible to conduct audience research in virtually any imaginable setting; the choice rests – first – with the researcher's driving questions, and depends – second – on the feasibility of the study.

Fieldwork is, of course, impossible without access to the field. I referred earlier to the feasibility factor, which must be considered carefully as one embarks on a plan of research. In the following section I'll outline some of the considerations that need to be assessed at the outset of any qualitative or quasi-ethnographic audience study.

Risk and Power

One of my doctoral students was eager to investigate the uses of media among undocumented Chinese women working “under the table” in restaurants, laundries, and other businesses. She had had some experience of these situations and knew that, because many of these women were illiterate in English, media in their native language were lifelines for them, shoring up their sense of identity and offering them reassurance and familiarity. She wanted to conduct a participant observation in a restaurant or sewing sweatshop, taking a job there herself and studying the day-to-day media usage of the workers.

It sounded like a great plan; but, the more we thought about it, the more we realized that it couldn't work. The potential harms to the study participants – an important consideration for any university's human subjects board – would be great, and the women themselves would be acutely aware of this. Most of all, they would fear that their “illegal” status would somehow be revealed to the authorities, which could result in job loss or, in the worst-case scenario, in deportation. As an ethical matter of informed consent, my student would have to tell them of her goal of writing their stories into a dissertation, which would raise red flags with them immediately.

We considered asking the university's institutional review board (IRB) for a waiver of informed consent; but, if we got it, the ethical implications of the work would become even more complex. My student, a Chinese woman herself, was privileged by comparison with the women she'd be studying: she was in the United States legally, on a student visa, getting her graduate degree, and on the way to an upper-middle-class career as a university professor. She was safe by comparison with her proposed subjects, whose lives were in constant peril and who were working in grim, grinding, and impoverished conditions. Deceiving them about who she was in order to gather data for her research seemed like a breach of faith that just wasn't justified.

Ethical considerations like these are at the core of audience research, and they go far beyond the matter of “risk to subjects,” which review boards are concerned about. The most potent ethical issues rest on the paired concepts of risk and power. One of my graduate students noted sagely that researchers are inclined to “study down” – that is, to investigate populations of lower social status than the researchers. Hence we tend to have many audience studies of housewives, children, college students, and working journalists. By comparison, we don't tend to see studies of politicians, business executives, doctors, lawyers, or university administrators: these groups are adept at building walls around them that effectively bar graduate students, or even university professors, from gaining access to their elite worlds. It's rare and difficult for us to “study up.”

Because we “study down,” the power differentials between the researcher and the researched are of pivotal importance. Oakley (1981) suggests that a nonhierarchical relationship between researcher and researched is an optimum condition for gathering information, and the feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith famously noted that researchers participate in “relations of ruling”:

The temptation to “study down” may be a well-intentioned effort to represent under-represented perspectives or give voice to socially ostracized or silenced populations – to “speak for others,” in the now-classic formulation of Linda Alcoff (1991/2). But, of course, in speaking for less privileged others, the researcher is taking the words out of their mouths – a power move that prevents the subaltern from speaking (Spivak, 1988). Still, there is potential merit to the corollary idea of speaking on behalf of others – a progressive project that introduces the element of activism to scholarship. Because of these complexities, the motivations and ramifications of “studying down” need to be explicitly considered as part of the study's theory and methodology.

Study participants may be intimidated by the status and background of the researcher, which may constrain their behaviors and their responses to questions. The research setting is inevitably altered by the presence of a researcher, especially in an ethnographic study, so questions of validity become paramount and their answers can hinge on the relationship between the researcher and the study participants. Long-term immersion in the field setting is one answer to this dilemma: true participant observation can only be effectively accomplished if the researcher becomes deeply familiar with the setting and the subjects, without losing her/his observational acuity. An intimate knowledge of the field “is also a source of knowledge that makes possible a transformation of what we know, specifically of the anthropologist's own self-understandings” (Borneman & Hammoudi, 2009, p. 14). It's crucial for fledgling researchers to be aware of the delicate balance to be struck in field settings before plunging into a research project.

There is also the question of “activist ethnography,” the well-intentioned efforts to effect progressive social change through research; these can be successful, but they can also backfire, causing more grief than good. For decades, ethnographers have been aware of the ways in which social research has served colonizing, imperialist, and racist agendas. The feminist and postmodern critiques of these problems countered these trends by generating ethnographic experimentations with collaborative, dialogic, and activist forms of participant observation. Oftentimes now, the subjects or participants in a study are seen as “epistemic partners” and the research is perceived as providing “collaborative resources for common objects and questions” (Marcus, 2007, p. 9). Activist ethnography can be a powerful societal force, and there are growing movements to support applied research of this kind. In her presidential address to the Council on Anthropology and Education, Catherine Emihovich exhorted students and faculty to engage in action-oriented research: “[W]e must find a way to harness all the wisdom and knowledge we have collected over the years to engage in action at all levels” (2005, p. 306). Examples of successful activist ethnographic projects abound, from working with grassroots community organizing groups in order to challenge unemployment, housing affordability, and local segregation (Lyon-Callo & Hyatt, 2007) to fostering indigenous peoples' resistance movements (Hale, 2006). Yet, as Hale (2006) cautions, activist researchers are often “partly implicated in the very systems of oppression they set out to oppose” (p. 98) or, worse, they can impose outsider views and disrupt local situations in ways that actually harm the communities being studied. Funding sources and institutional affiliations can also affect the slant and focus of the research. If activist projects are undertaken, the researcher must be certain that they are carried out in close coalition with the members of the community and that they support the expressed goals and needs of the local people. Yet such involvement will, of course, have implications for the entire project: as Fine (1993) has noted, “participant observation often becomes participant intervention: finding a problem, we wish to fix it” (p. 287) – and these motivations shade the way in which data are gathered, findings are reported, and studies are written up. It is critical for audience researchers to be acutely aware of this problematic and to foreground it in their research designs.

My student Yu Shi did end up studying working-class Chinese women, but they were not undocumented laborers, and they were fully informed of her research goals. As she pointed out in her dissertation:

Negotiating these intricacies as part of her relationship with her research subjects was one challenge of her dissertation work; her awareness of the need to explicate these issues added strength and rigor to her data collection and analysis. Thus reflexivity is a crucial aspect of audience work: the researcher's identity location vis-à-vis that of the participants, the researcher's goals and motivations for undertaking the research, the researcher's perspectives on the participant population, all impact the value of the project.

Different populations call for different recognitions of power and risk. Working with children exacerbates the power hierarchies at play, and class differences further complicate the mix. In my own fieldwork with schoolgirls (Durham, 1999, 2001, 2004). I found that middle- and upper-class children were open to my research, indifferent to my recording and note-taking equipment, and unconcerned about my presence in their environment, whereas impoverished children were guarded and wary, reluctant to be recorded, and confrontational about my goals. The differences stemmed from their varying experiences with adults: lower-income children had learned to view adults as punitive, authoritarian, and generally critical presences in their lives, so these girls were justifiably more suspicious of my interest than their middle-class peers.

Several of my graduate students have undertaken audience research with children, and they have grappled with these complexities as part of their methodological strategizing. For Shayla Thiel, ensuring that the girls she was studying did not feel coerced into disclosing private information was of vital importance. She was studying girls' uses of instant messaging, and the data she used were submitted voluntarily by her subjects.

Thiel dealt with validity through the use of multi-methodological triangulation.

None of these issues could have been successfully handled if the researchers had not had a keen understanding of their research subjects, as well as a great deal of self-awareness regarding the relational dynamics at work between themselves and their subjects. Before a researcher sets up a method for conducting audience research, he or she must learn as much as possible about the intended study population. Robust audience research cannot be undertaken blindly: knowing as much as possible before entering the subjects' “space” allows the researcher to develop an appropriate method as well as suitably nuanced and sophisticated research questions. I recently heard a research presentation in which the researcher had made certain assumptions about an ethnic minority group's reactions to health messages. The researcher had no empirical ground for making these assumptions: they were based solely on stereotype, and therefore they jeopardized the entire research enterprise. The questions being asked, the method that had been developed, and the theorization framing the study were all irrelevant in light of the fact that the underlying assumptions were unproven and untrustworthy.

One of the three decrees carved on Apollo's sanctuary at Delphi in ancient Greece was “Know thyself.” My advice to future audience researchers is: “Know thyself and thy subjects before starting a study.”

Mentoring the Fledgling Researcher

As detailed above, the exigencies of audience research in the field call for close and attentive relationships between graduate advisors and their students. When students are conducting audience work, situations arise that are unlikely to crop up in text analysis – or even in experimental settings, where conditions are more closely controlled. In fieldwork, students run into all manner of ethical and personal dilemmas: they may become emotionally attached to their study participants; they may discover illegal activity and be uncertain as to how to deal with it; they may be asked to engage in unethical behaviors in order to gain access to a social setting or gather information; they may run up against uncooperative or hostile people; they may be threatened or physically harmed. It is incumbent upon the faculty mentor to maintain close contact with his/her students while they're in the field, in order to advise, guide, and protect them from harm while the study is underway. Field situations are dynamic and unpredictable, and circumstances change almost daily. Inexperienced field researchers may not know how to handle the problems that present themselves in the field, so mentors must be available for consultation at any point.

Helpful mentoring is born of experience: the best mentors for fieldworkers are those who have ventured into the field themselves and have dealt at first hand with the provocations and challenges of audience research. Because of this, mentors can't afford to be reticent about sharing with students their own work – and their own dilemmas, problems, even failures; these “tales of the field” are part of the learning experience. I, as well as other faculty members who teach classes on audience research and supervise graduate students conducting it, sometimes assign our own articles in classes, and we do it with the goal of discussing the predicaments and aggravations we encountered in our own forays into the field and of encouraging students to ask probing questions and to interrogate the ethics, politics, and problematics of our methodologies. For example, during my own fieldwork with adolescent girls on issues of gender and sexuality, I promised these girls confidentiality, but I also determined, privately, that, if I came across a child in an abusive situation, I would break my promise and report it. And in fact I did learn that one of my study participants had been sexually abused by a family member; fortunately the school social worker had already alerted the authorities and the situation was being handled by Child Protective Services. Jennifer Hasty (2010) reflects on the notion of positionality in the pursuit of fieldwork, exploring the ways in which “responsible complicity” with the community one is studying can sometimes draw researchers into participating in possibly unethical or even illegal activities. As a young ethnographer conducting media anthropology at a newspaper in Ghana, she was asked to lie in order to get a story: she dodged the situation. Other fieldworkers have had to make difficult decisions about participating in illegal activities such as drug use or dealing, or about concealing such activities from the authorities. These are just a few examples of the predicaments of positionality in fieldwork, but the need for alert and expert mentoring is underscored through the recognition that contingencies of all sorts can intervene in the best designed field observations.

Space and Place

When we're studying media audiences, we generally want to know how they're using the media: their choices of media, their engagements with them, their negotiations of media messages, and their production of media. These research aims call for making choices about the setting in which it's best to learn about these processes. There are, of course, a wide variety of physical – and, increasingly, virtual – locations in which to study media audiences; all require the researcher to decide on a space in which the study will be conducted and then to “cross a border” into that space.

Sometimes these spaces are classrooms, or specially equipped university research facilities outfitted with wide-screen monitors, recording equipment, and one-way mirrors for observation. Experiments, focus groups, and sometimes questionnaires or surveys are administered in such settings. At other times, surveys are conducted via telephone, email, or the Web; then the “space” of the study is auditory or virtual. Sometimes the researcher attempts to study the audience in a more “natural” environment and enters a home, a school, a club, a dormitory, or some other setting in order to try to observe the audience in its characteristic habitat, so to speak.

In all cases, the choice of “space” has its drawbacks as well as its strengths. A space that the researcher has designated and prepared for a study has the “benefit” of being thoroughly artificial; that is, as Webster and Sell (2007) point out, “[a]rtificiality means that a well-designed experiment can incorporate all the theoretically presumed causes of certain phenomena while eliminating or minimizing factors that have not been theoretically identified as causal” (p. 34). In artificially contrived research settings, the researcher doesn't have to consider the impact of environmental factors on the data: the data can be considered in isolation from all other factors. Research facilities in fact do facilitate research: they make data collection easier and more manageable. They are geared to the researcher's convenience.

Paradoxically, this very artificiality can be a significant drawback in media audience research, where audience members tend to interact with the media in an eclectic assortment of settings, while they are beleaguered by distractions of every sort or comfortably ensconced in some private and familiar space – perhaps in a bedroom or basement – or among friends, in a bar or cafeteria. Such settings reflect more accurately the ways in which the media are part of an overall social space or living environment, allowing researchers to track the ways in which media use happens in everyday life. Given these realities, the data gathered in focus group facilities, laboratories, or classrooms may not be generalizable, because they have little bearing on real-world media use. Moreover, study participants may feel uncomfortable or intimidated by such settings, and their responses to the media may be affected accordingly. Power is, once more, a factor in selecting the location of an audience study.

On the other hand, the “messier” real-world research spaces pose problems, too. The researcher's presence is the first: the researcher is the stranger element in the field setting and must work to find a place in it. He/she has to establish a rapport with the study participants, ensuring that they are fully informed and have consented to the study. Becoming familiar with the research environment could take weeks or months; while initial observations can and should be recorded, patterns as well as anomalies can only be discerned after longer-term immersion in the field setting.

Fieldwork complicates data collection. Field researchers must decide whether to use obtrusive recording equipment – which, again, may discomfit the study participants – or whether to try to find more subtle methods of collecting data, perhaps by reconstructing a situation shortly after its occurrence, but not in the presence of the study participants. Crang and Cook (1995) describe researchers running to the bathroom to write up their field notes, a condition jokingly known as “ethnographer's bladder.” In the field, ambient noise can muffle tape recordings, coffee can get spilt on notebooks, cameras batteries can run out. There are definite challenges to doing field research; but as Borneman and Hammoudi (2009) assert, “the agony of fieldwork [is] integral to knowledge production” (p. 260). Being there matters.

A note needs to be made here about entering audiences' physical environments. In this online era, it's tempting to believe that text and audience merge: that words on a screen are equivalent to the person who generated them. And indeed, online ethnographies can, and have, been conducted – though the notion is still controversial and must be approached with rigor, caution, and a thorough understanding of the implications. As Hine (2006) points out: “Online social formations seem to challenge existing ways of conceptualizing research sites and ask for new strategies of exploration” (p. 10). Can online social environments be conflated with offline ones? How does one verify the identity of an online informant? What are the concerns with validity and reliability in online research?

In Jay Clarkson's (2006) dissertation research on the production of masculinity in an online gay community, these questions were asked in order to formulate a method that would yield valid data and findings. In his decision to study the online community so as to gain “a better understanding of these men's cultural practices and the institutional and ideological factors that influence them,” Clarkson argued for “the unique characteristics of the Internet as a research space” (p. 53). “The men use this space and the discussion of media stereotypes as an identity expressive function,” he notes (p. 48). In addition, he decided to observe the site as a so-called “lurker” – but not as a participant, since his participation had the potential to disrupt the site's authentic dynamics.

Yet Clarkson's defense of online-only ethnographies has been challenged and debated in more recent years, as the popularity and scope of analyzing online interactions has dramatically increased. Lindlof and Shatzer (1998) point out the potential perils of misinterpretation or miscommunication in online interactions, which could arise from lack of nonverbal cues and other ambient information. Yet Marwick and boyd (2010), in a study of Twitter users, focused only on the online context, arguing that the online arena constitutes a “networked community” that can be studied on its own.

Thus a crucial question vexing ethnographers today is that of the validity of online research as authentic fieldwork. Is “being there” online the same as “being there” in person? How trustworthy, verifiable, and useful are online spaces as research sites? How can one verify the claims made in the virtual world? In Lee Farquhar's dissertation on identity negotiation on Facebook, the pros and cons of online research were carefully weighed; Farquhar concluded: “The value of online interactions is bolstered when coupled with offline interactions. They become informative both in terms of understanding the individual through their discussion of other content and through differences (if any) in their performances in each setting” (Farquhar, 2009, p. 53). Farquhar coupled online participant observation with offline “F2F” interviews with his subjects, a methodological decision supported by much of the relevant scholarship in this area.

“Emerging online spaces of the Internet [. . .] belong to an entirely new category of space,” notes Burrell. She argues that cyber-ethnography must be understood as a process in which the researcher “physically inhabits only certain parts of the space” (Burrell, 2009, p. 187). The field site must be thought of as a network that includes online and offline locations and their intersections. Triangulation, multi-sited approaches, and verification become more central to fieldwork involving online communities and virtual identities. “Use of the Internet frequently involves an engagement with the imagination and the production of imagined spaces because there is much that this medium conceals,” she writes; but “imagined spaces constituted an important source of meaning that could be related to the experiences and activities of Internet users on a nonimaginary plane of existence” (pp. 193 and 194). Both the imaginary and the nonimaginary are crucial to virtual ethnography: one cannot be privileged over the other. Validity is tied to constructing the field site as one that closely tracks the phenomenon under investigation.

In this vein, media audience research in an Internet age calls for new methodological and theoretical questions to be asked. As the Internet and related technologies evolve, online media audiences cannot be conceptualized in traditional ways, as they often are both producers and receivers of media; they are simultaneously occupying multiple roles and locations in the media matrix; and in a rapid-fire, interactive, dynamic media environment new approaches and understandings of “audience” are called for. Media studies is a field that is bombarded by minute-to-minute changes – in technologies, in audiences, in social configurations, in economic structures, in identity politics. The virtual is melding with the “real” and the hyperreal in unforeseen ways. There is a growing literature in this area, and students opting to conduct online audience research must be well versed in the methods, theorizations, and debates that surround and support such work.

Tackling Audience Research: Closing Thoughts

All of these developments in media audience research engage two key questions: What is a media audience – and why conduct audience research? Neither has an easy answer any more. The first calls for new definitions, new conceptualizations, and new research approaches in an era of post-postmodern fragmentation and constant technological flux.

The second calls for philosophical reflexivity and for a sense of how one's work might contribute, not just to the field of media research, but to our knowledge of the world. As Ang (2000) pointedly demands: “Why are we so interested in knowing about audiences in the first place?” (p. 487). To what end are we invading people's spaces, interrogating their practices, analyzing the texts and images they create? From a critical/cultural studies perspective, there is always a degree of exploitation in such an enterprise. Traditional audience research has always had a commercial or political aim; more critically oriented studies have addressed the nature of media, their role in subjectivity, their motivating mechanisms. The training of future scholars must guide them to think carefully about why they might want to engage in audience research, what their relationship with those audiences should be, and what the ultimate good of such research will be.

In the end, the research questions the student is asking will drive the method of data collection; ethnography and related qualitative approaches are best suited to research questions that seek to uncover the subsurface complexities of people' s engagements with media in their everyday lives. As Gillespie observed:

No other methodological investment can offer the depth, texture, intricacy, and verisimilitude of long-term fieldwork. When research seeks to penetrate into the complex workings of the media in the gloriously heterogeneous and diverse “real world,” then the researcher must arm himself or herself with a field diary, recording equipment, informed consent forms, and an intrepid attitude, and venture, like an explorer, into the media wilderness, where a multitude of joys and discoveries about media audiences await. In the end, it is the academy's responsibility to teach and mentor future media scholars to find their way in the wilderness of audience research.

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