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Studying Audiences with Sense-Making Methodology

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Brenda Dervin

Introduction

The primary goal of this chapter is to outline an intellectual and practical approach for studying audience/user reception that is informed by Brenda Dervin's sense-making methodology (abbreviated as SMM). The chapter discusses research drawn from reception studies in order to demonstrate current and potential applications of the research approach we describe here. Our main purpose is to illuminate the conceptual contours of SMM's potential usefulness for reception studies that strive to be holistic and authentic; hence the chapter refers briefly to relevant empirical projects, but it does not report comprehensively on their research results per se. Throughout the chapter we use research terminology – including such phrases as “life-facing,” “engaging,” and “step-taking” – drawn from and informed by the SMM approach (Dervin, 2008; Dervin & Foreman-Wernet, 2003).

SMM is a philosophically informed methodological approach that is based on a metaphorical conceptualization of human sense-making designed for systematic application to research design, data collection, and analysis. On the basis of a core assumption that human life-facing involves taking steps (material and phenomenological) across situated conditions that are, at least in part, discontinuous, SMM's metaphor is applied methodologically by directing research attention to how humans (e.g., audiences/users) take situated material and phenomenological sense-making steps, bridging gaps in time and space and arriving at outcomes that form the situated entries for the next moments in time–space. The entire framework is assumed to be metaphorically epistemological; it is not intended to be, in itself, ontological, even though, as a research tool, it is designed to attend to what is ontologically “real” for sense-makers. In our discussion we focus on how we have applied SMM to study those times and spaces where a person – the audience/user – has engaged with some media product: we refer to such times and spaces as media reception situations.

We position the focus on media reception situations as a subset of audience and reception studies. In particular, we are not discussing what constitutes the “audience” or the “user,” nor are we interested in the domestication of media products into the spheres of people's everyday lives. Instead we concentrate on the reception processes associated with engaging with media products. We define reception processes as those internal and external behaviors associated with decoding and recoding media technologies and mediated content. Thus our study of media reception situations is interested in understanding the internal and external behaviors that occur when one is engaging with media products.

To begin our discussion of how we have studied media reception situations, we will first illustrate what we see as the complexities of media reception situations by locating various factors that have historically been posited in literatures as potentially influencing media reception outcomes. We group these factors into three main categories that we conceptualize as constituting the media reception situation. These foci are:

• on the media product, the content and technology features;
• on the person, sociodemographic and psychographic characteristics;
• on the context of use, the situation, and sense-making processes.

Our assumption is that most theorizing to date has focused on the nature of the media product, the nature of the person, and, to a lesser extent, the nature of the context of use. Usually the context of use and the media reception situation have been treated as synonymous and unitary. This contrasts with how SMM implements an assumption of situationality: the idea is that events seen as unitary by outsiders can be systematically examined from the perspective of actors and how they see themselves as moving through the events in terms of material and phenomenological step-takings; these moves are sometimes informed by past habits and propensities, and sometimes by unique situations.

Our goal is to illustrate how we have used SMM in audience and reception studies to address all three contributing factors in a media reception situation through the “lens” of situated sense-making processes. To that end, we have employed SMM to inform the data collection and analysis of media reception situations.

In this chapter we present an outline of our definition of media reception as a situation of audience/user engaging with a media product; we discuss how various approaches have generally focused on some aspects of the media reception situation while at the same time pinpointing what we see as struggles; we discuss how we have made SMM assist in our understanding of media reception situations; and we conclude with case studies typical of the kind of studies we have been conducting.

Media Reception Situation

A number of different discourses have in some way dealt with the phenomena that constitute a media reception situation: an audience/user, a media product, and the contextual situation in which both are positioned. The differences across discourse communities often blind us to the fact that, at least sometimes, these communities are all pursuing reception studies when the term “reception” is used, as we use it, to focus on processes of engaging with media products. Far beyond media and communication studies, we find that in a wide array of discourse communities (e.g., political science, health education, legal studies, policy studies, art education, and management) there is growing interest in how audiences and users react to and engage with messages relayed through media products.

These scholarly treatments of “reception” have mostly pointed to two central entities: the person who is engaging with the media product; and the media product itself. Far fewer have explicitly included the contextual situation of reception in their formulations. Generally, however, it is fair to suggest that there is increasing agreement that media reception involves a social and historical situation in which an audience/user engages with a media product in the context of everyday life – and the latter includes the variety of ways in which everyday life situations and the world at large can impact the person's process of engaging. Drawing on the myriad literatures that have focused their attention on the audience reception process, we offer our own understanding of how these bodies of work converge to produce a “picture” of the media reception situation in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1 Illustration of media reception situation. Source: The figure as presented is informed by Richard Carter's “picturing language” (Dervin, 2003).

In the figure there are four main components: (a) “the world”; (b) the situation: time–space moment(s); (c) the audience/user; and (d) the media product. Each main component is ascribed either subparts or attributes to show what we assume is the interconnectedness of the components and the deep complexity of any given media reception situation.

(a) “THE WORLD” is a shorthand term applied to the combination of sociocultural, political–economic, and historical/material conditions in which the situation occurs, with potential for impacting both the audience/user and the media product through the internalization of “the world” before, during, and after the engaging. In this model “structural conditions” are assumed to be a constant attribute of “the world,” although particular formations would vary across time–space.

(b) THE SITUATION – TIME–SPACE MOMENT(S) is a specific intersection of time–space moments that provides the contextual boundaries within which the audience/user physically and interpretatively interacts with the media product. The audience/user and the media product are pictured as having some kind of connection, producing the act of engaging, within any given time–space moment. Because time–space is assumed to be constantly moving, it is likewise assumed that these interconnections may vary across time–space.

(c) THE AUDIENCE/USER is conceptualized as possessing agency, the capacity to act physically and interpretatively. Agency is, in turn, pictured as potentially being enacted in instances where it is informed and/or impacted by lived experiences and/or by the various structural groupings to which society assigns humans membership and within which individual users may (or may not) implement their agency. These include sociological and cultural groups, as well as psychological attributes that the audience/user may or may not have and habits developed over time.

(d) THE MEDIA PRODUCT contains an interweaving of technological interface and content structures that potentially cue and constrain how the audience/user engages. Additionally, content is encoded within, and from the conditions of, “the world” in which it was created. We consider these constraints and affordances to be the media product's parameters of engaging: the requirements imposed upon the audiences/users that potentially impact the quality of engaging with the media product.

This illustration is intended to reflect what we see as a fuller picture of the complexities of a media reception situation. In the next section we describe how various discourse communities have studied media reception situations primarily by focusing on one or two of the components in Figure 3.1.

Approaches to Researching Media Reception Situations

Various discourse communities have studied media reception situations to understand (a) what has led audiences to the moment of engaging; (b) what occurred during the engaging; (c) what resulted from the engaging; and (d) how (a) and (b) have impacted (c). Usually the different approaches emphasize different components of the media reception situation, regarded as expected predictors for the processes and outcomes of the engaging. Primary approaches that have researched media reception include studies of media effects, of uses and gratifications (U&G), of film reception, of human–computer interaction, of everyday life ethnography, and of decoding/encoding (Jensen & Rosengren, 1990; Schneiderman, Plaisant, Cohen, & Jacobs, 2009; Staiger, 2005).

Media effects studies has typically been concerned with identifying what, during a media engaging situation, leads to a specified outcome – such as being more violent or sexually aggressive. Research has typically focused on measuring the amount and type of engaging with some predetermined content (e.g., violent films, pornography), and on attempting to find a correlation or a causal relationship between this kind of engaging and outcomes. Uses and gratifications studies (U&G) was developed within the media effects community in order to counter a tendency for media effects studies to assume that everyone exposed to the same content would be impacted in the same way (Reinhard & Dervin, 2009). Instead, U&G sought to understand what motivated the audience/user to engage with the media product, on the assumption that, by understanding this motivation, the researcher can better predict under what conditions exposure will result in some specified effect. The utilization of the U&G concept to understand media effects has led some to label this chiefly quantitative approach as “media uses and effects studies” (Jensen & Rosengren, 1990).

Film studies has traditionally focused on deconstructing film texts as a means of understanding film productions processes and authorial intentions. Questions about the moviegoer have been handled by spectator theories (Staiger, 2005), where the reception of the moviegoer is theorized to be dictated by some aspect of the filmic text. More recently, by drawing on cognitive psychology (Bordwell, 1989) and on German reception theory (Holub, 1984), increased emphasis has been placed on the meaning-making processes that occur when an audience/user engages with a filmic text. However, as with spectator theories, these new approaches have been largely theoretical, lacking empirical evidence with which to refute or substantiate claims.

Human–computer interaction (HCI) studies, also known as design studies or user studies, is largely concerned with issues of hardware usability and ergonomics. When the research is about a media product – and these encompass, chiefly, computer-based applications (e.g., electronic games, or particular software products) – HCI studies seeks to ascertain what about the media product helped or hindered the audience/user's engaging (Schneiderman et al., 2009). Thus, a typical research approach has involved a laboratory session whereby audiences/users are exposed to media products and their reactions are recorded. As with media effects studies, the desire has been to understand what determines the outcome of the engaging, typically conceptualized as usability.

Everyday life ethnography studies and decoding/encoding studies have in common their roots in qualitative methodology and in critical/cultural–theoretical considerations. Both fields can be seen as concerned with issues similar to those researched in media uses and effects studies: chiefly their object is what leads audiences/users to engage with media products and what results. However, because of differences in research philosophies, these approaches have studied the media reception situation by focusing more on uncovering the agency of the audience/user and the role of media reception in everyday life. This emphasis includes lived experiences and material conditions of each person's everyday lifeworld, as well as motivations and outcomes of engaging.

The primary difference between everyday life ethnographic studies and decoding/encoding studies has involved the methods used to study the process of engaging. In ethnographic studies, various methods, such as in-depth interviews and participant observation, have been used to generate a map of the various interpretative and performative acts and material objects that are part of the media reception situation. In encoding/decoding studies, individual and group interviews have been conducted to understand what Hall (1993) described as the encoding of ideological positions into media products and the ways in which people decoded, or dealt with, these positions.

Unfortunately there is insufficient space here for a full accounting of these various discourses and of their theoretical and methodological considerations. In our view, all have made important advances, but each continues to struggle with particular aspects of media reception. What we see as a struggle relates to the particular focus of each approach on the media reception situation. We review each focus below as a “lens” for studying the media reception situation: each lens offers a partial glimpse into the situation and struggles to show a fuller picture. Our intention in this discussion is to extract what we see as general patterns. Clearly there is great variability and rich depth in the way different researchers approach their studies of audience/user media engaging. For our purposes here we bracket such variability in order to focus on major thrusts.

Approach 1: Focusing on Media Product Structures

Most approaches to studying reception emphasize the impact of various assumed structures on outcomes of media reception. Usually these impacts are assumed to be constant and predictive, both in qualitative and in quantitative research: such has been the case, historically, when the structure was a material object: the media product.

Across discourse communities, technological and content features of media products and the production practices and forces that determine them are assumed to cue and constrain the type of reception possible with that media product. For HCI the focus is on the interface and on how the technology creates certain parameters of engaging, or requirements on the physical and interpretative interactivity the audience/user must perform in order to engage with the media product. For media uses and effects, film, and encoding/decoding studies, the focus is on the content; this orientation may include a focus on the ideological positions of the world argued to be encoded into the content's message. These ideological positions, for example, may extend to messages regarding what is appropriate or not for gender, class, and ethnicity relations. Whether the focus is on the content or on the technology, typically there are assumptions about what the outcome of the engaging would be, should the audience member engage with the media product, as is expected by those who designed and produced that product.

We do not argue against the presence and potential impact of such structures. The media product is a material object that, we assume, has been produced with the intended parameters for engaging, as well as with built-in ideological meanings, be they intentional or unintentional. A videogame requires certain types of action on the part of the audience/user, which are different from the requirements placed upon the reader of a literary novel. These requirements impact the act of engaging with the media product; should the videogame and the literary novel have the same content and the same ideologically attached meanings, the interface could also potentially impact interpretation. Thus we assume that we cannot discuss media reception situations without appreciating the structural characteristics of the media product being engaged with in the situation.

However, to conceptualize the media product's “impact” on reception in a deterministic way presupposes that every engaging with a media product, from every audience/user, must produce the same outcome. Almost all the studies focusing on the impact of media products have tended to explain audience/user differences as not being due to the agency of the audience/user, and they did so by assuming that media structures are somehow internalized by audiences/users and that this is what predicts or explains media reception outcomes. Studies arising from the encoding/decoding approach provide somewhat more leeway, by assuming that individual differences in interpretation arise from internalized audience/user structures that drive the process of audience/user decoding of content (Hall, 1993). However, this assumption involves a struggle we discuss in the next section.

Approach 2: Focusing on Audience/User Structures

This approach to studying audience reception emphasizes the impact of structures that are assumed to be internalized by, and thus to become integral parts of, the audience/user of the media product. These audience/user structures are considered to reflect the internalized impact of audience memberships in socially defined groupings based on sociodemographic and/or psychographic categories. Sociological and cultural categories include such demographics as age, gender, or ethnicity, and psychographic categories include such traits as the need for cognition, internal–external control, or sensation-seeking.

Sociodemographic categories are groupings that reflect sociocultural and historical constructions of appropriate internal and external behaviors for individuals as based on socially accepted group membership categories. Usually these categories are imposed, as if audiences/users had no agency awareness of these memberships. In some work, explicit attention is placed on audiences/users as agents aware of their socially accepted group memberships. Most research, however, assumes that these group membership categories, recognized or otherwise, have a constant and unified impact. The internalization of external membership is assumed to occur through living from day to day in societies and cultures that define what constitutes membership in a particular subgroup.

Psychographic categories, used more extensively in media uses and effects studies, also rely, although less obviously, on externally imposed and socially accepted membership groups – a reliance that should be understood in terms of various psychological theories regarding personality traits and behavioral tendencies. These socially accepted conceptualizations are then used to explain audience/user media engagings. Psychographic categories are theorized as resulting from experiential learning and/or neurophysiologic ingraining. Depending upon which theory the researcher subscribes to, the psychographic categories may be conceptualized as being originally internal, or as being external and then internalized during a person's life.

Thus studies that focus on audiences/users often predict that the impact of media engagings results from, or is related to, sociodemographic and psychographic groupings of traits; and they emphasize how an audience/user is positioned as a member of various externally defined groupings. Like the focus on the structures of media products, the focus on structures assumed to be internal(ized) by human beings usually presupposes that all the group members will respond in similar fashion to media products. The core assumption is that, if audiences/users share common traits, norms, and values deriving from their membership, then those audiences/users would be expected to react en masse in a particular way toward a particular media product. Differences in the outcome of media reception situations would be expected to be greatest between members of different groups rather than between members of the same group. This assumption is usually made both for approaches that study audience members as agents endowed with knowledge of their group membership position and for approaches that consider such membership to be unconscious and unarticulated.

Again, we do not argue that such internalized structures do not have potential connections with media engagings. The difficulty, however, is that the assumption of group uniformity in reception is rarely tested. More research is needed to understand the conditions under which group membership does matter in determining the outcome of media reception situations, and the conditions under which it does not; there may be more similarities within groups than between them.

Approach 3: Focusing on Situational Structures

The last of the “structures” in Figure 3.1 deals with specific aspects of the environment and of the context within which a situation occurs. This structural category is the least studied one. In those cases where it has been studied, the assumptions enacted have tended to be similar to those we described above for structures of the media product and the audience/user.

Typically, a study's focus on situation attempts to be the description of the context, not in terms of the evolving moments of the audience/user's experience, but in terms of how an external observer understands the situation. For example, the techniques of observation of everyday life ethnography detail the surroundings in which an engaging occurs, examining how these material conditions impact media reception. In media uses and effects and in HCI studies, the situation will sometimes be employed as a between-subjects variable and the researcher will compare locations of engaging such as workplace versus home or public versus private.

In both qualitative and quantitative approaches to media reception, there has tended to be more empirical focus on generalized media engagings than on specific instances of engaging. It is our contention that asking audiences/users about general media engagings assumes that there is stability to media engagings; for example, an audience/user who watches a television serial will watch each new episode in a repetitive/habitual way. Because the usual research approach has been to assume stability, the potential variability within different media reception situations has been left unstudied. In essence, attempts to capture a stable average representation of media engagings elide differences among these engagings.

The above does not mean that researchers have not attempted to address specific instances of engagings. However, these attempts have usually been implemented in artificially constructed laboratory or experimental situations, where attention to audience/user interpretation is lacking. We argue that, in order to understand media reception more fully, we need to introduce a treatment of situation in terms of what we call “situationality”: the nature of the situation as engaged, interpretatively and materially, in the evolving step-takings.

Approach 4: Focusing on Sense-Making Processes

The last approach addresses the potentiality for agency, as depicted in Figure 3.1. Studies taking this approach consider the sense-making processes: internal and external behaviors that occur within the situation. In our view, this aspect of media reception situations is understudied. Most attempts generalize situations in unitary ways, as they are seen by outside observers. Few researchers have examined what we think will be a productive contribution to media reception studies – namely situated step-takings through media engagings.

Some approaches have considered agency in relation to structure(s). In fact uses and gratifications, encoding/decoding, and ethnographic studies developed as a reaction against conceptions of the passive audience/user being deterministically affected by the structures we discussed. However, such studies still resort, typically, to assuming that internal(ized) structures grounded in external ones, imposed by society and culture, are determining factors in explaining, understanding, and predicting outcomes (Jensen & Rosengren, 1990; Morley, 2006).

Again, we do not claim that structures do not potentially cue and constrain reception. We do argue, however, that there is something more that we need to understand: how the audience/user makes sense of these structural features, and the play of these structural features in given media reception situations. Our use of the term “play” here is deliberate in that, while there have been many rich attempts to examine audience/user enactments of structural features (of media, of societal memberships, and of contexts of use), very few have deliberately and theoretically allowed audience sense-making to deem structural features irrelevant, or otherwise invisible. Further, few have examined how this “play” changes in character as audiences/users move through media reception situations.

Situated and evolving audience sense-making is, for us, the missing link in media reception studies. We argue that we cannot know how media products constrain and cue reception without attempting to understand audience/user sense-making of media product structures. Likewise, we argue that we cannot assume group membership as a determining factor, eliding personal, situated sense-making without examination of that sense-making. The lynchpin for us is the question: How do the audiences/users' views of their everyday lives, as well as their acceptance of and struggles with membership categories, relate to the way they interpret the structural features of media products, so that there results what we, as researchers, study as media reception?

As a possible way to answer this question, we will now turn to how we have used Dervin's SMM to (re)empower agency in order to conceptualize media engaging outcomes as resulting from situated sense-making processes.

Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM)

SMM has allowed us to move further toward our goal of determining how a person makes sense of a situation of engaging with a media product in that it has allowed us to account for the audience/user's interpretation of various structural features of a specific media product, of any group memberships, and of the context or environment in which the engaging occurs. In doing this accounting, we have been able to tease out how these sense-makings may or may not be important factors impacting the reception of the media product. What has allowed us to pursue this goal is our use of SMM as a methodological approach informing question formulation, data collection, and analysis.

SMM is an approach that has been in development and use for some 30 years. We describe it only briefly here, attending especially to those aspects that have most informed our address of media reception studies. Figure 3.2 below illustrates the central metaphor of SMM, which draws on a wide variety of philosophic sources (Dervin & Foreman-Wernet, 2003; Dervin & Naumer, 2009). Relying heavily on the work of Richard Carter (2003), SMM uses the idea of discontinuity or gap as a central concept in its methodological foundation. Gap is assumed to be a universal of the human condition: this time–space moment is not identical either to the preceding one or to the next. Time–space keeps moving. Hence the sense-maker is always conceptualized in SMM as moving, as never complete, and as never fully predetermined. SMM does allow for repetitious, habitual, constrained interpretations and behavior, but it does not assume these in advance.

Figure 3.2 Dervin's sense-making methodology metaphor. © Brenda Dervin, 2010.

The focus on gap in SMM does not presuppose that people are constantly stopped by ontologically real gaps. Nor does SMM presuppose that every time–space moment is filled with riddles, questions, and confusions. Rather, methodologically, the discontinuity assumption allows us to attend to how audiences/users make sense as they move through the before, the during, and the after of their media engagings. In some of these movements there will be no questions asked, but only repetitions of thoughts, answers, and practices from the past. These repetitions are seen as bridges over the gap. In other such movements there will be abrupt stops and many accompanying questions. These question-askings and searches for answers are also seen as potential bridges. In other movements there will be confusions that never get resolved, and time passes creating a bridge that is constructed out of unanswered and maybe even unasked questions. Yet in other movements there will be emotional experiences, and they become the bridge.

The description above is intended to illustrate the nature of SMM, although space limitations do not allow us to capture all relevant nuances. SMM has been designed not as an ontological theory but as a tool for methodological guidance. In SMM the entire framework – what is called the sense-making methodology metaphor and is sometimes referred as “the SMM triangle” – is positioned as a metaphor. It is around this metaphor that SMM develops a set of philosophically derived interviewing protocols, which have allowed us to address how audiences/users interpret the material and phenomenological aspects of their movements before, during, and after specific media reception situations.

An SMM interview is usually open-ended and highly structured. There is a repertoire of queries used to reflect SMM's philosophical assumptions about humans and human communicating activity (Dervin, 2008). The interview is structured so as to study human activity as being situated, as empowering the informant's interpretative experience, as understanding the informant's ever present potential struggles between agency and structure, and as always moving around and around and deeper and deeper into the informant's experience of the situation. SMM assumes that few humans come to question-answering situations that are fully articulated. There are assumed gaps among mind, spirit, heart, and body that require time for fuller articulation.

SMM interviews are always anchored by focusing on situations or events – time–space-bound moments of sense-making/sense-unmaking. A study could be interested in looking at the sense-making step-takings in just one situation, or at a series of situations that may or may not seem related to one another. Further, SMM interviewing protocols are designed to train interviewers in a new kind of listening. Interviewing is designed with a minimal imposition of researcher jargon – typically, the “nouns” of etic expertise – onto informants' experiential worlds. The goal of the SMM interview is to construct a space that facilitates and empowers informants to explain their worlds in their own terms and modes of sense-making. The SMM interview invites informants not only to describe their worlds, but to draw connections between things in their worlds – past, present, and future. As described below, SMM implements a repetitive circling of informant experiences. It may be said, by doing so, the SMM interview aims to enlist informants as fellow researchers and to empower them as theorists of their own worlds.

Across some 30 years of applications, a core set of SMM queries has been drawn from the philosophically informed SMM metaphor, and it has been positioned as constituting the essentials of an SMM interview. These queries, when appropriately adapted to particular cultural and language contexts, are considered to address universals of the human condition and the assumed mandate for humans to make and unmake sense through evolving and changing time–spaces. In the most recent formulation, these core SMM questions draw from the following array: What questions, muddles, confusions did you have? What ideas, conclusions, thoughts did you have? What emotions, feelings did you have? Was anything helpful? Was anything hurtful or hindering? If so, how? How did what was happening relate to your past experiences? How did what was happening relate to your sense of self? How did what was happening relate to your thoughts on power and how does it operate in the world around you? If you could wave a magic wand, what would you have changed?

In a process that Dervin labels “an archeological dig,” these core interviewing questions are applied multiple times in a given interview, and they are applied to the changing brackets of time–space. In this way SMM attempts to “surround” the situation as it was experienced by the audience/user. The aim is to assist audiences/users to reach fuller recollections of how they saw what was happening in media reception situations at particular time–spaces, as well as before and after them, and of how they saw what was happening in those time–spaces as relating to other times and other spaces.

There is not sufficient room here to detail all the various SMM interviewing approaches; these are described elsewhere (Dervin, 2008). Across the 30 years, a number of studies have examined the media reception situation. A subsection of SMM-inspired studies have worked to map the sense-making processes in media reception situations by examining a variety of media products: Dworkin, Foreman-Wernet, and Dervin (1999) on TV news; Shields (1999) on advertisements; Spirek, Dervin, Nilan, and Martin (1999) on newspaper reading; Huesca and Dervin (2003) on hypertext versus non-hypertext; Foreman-Wernet and Dervin (2004) on elite arts and pop culture products; Reinhard (2008) on gendered media engagings; Reinhard and Dervin (2010) on virtual worlds; and Dervin and Song (2005) have employed a uses-and-gratifications analysis.

The next two sections present two case studies of reception research recently conducted by the senior author. Each case uses a different SMM interviewing approach. These two example applications of SMM to reception research aim to understand more fully how much agency and structure(s) are interwoven in media reception situations. The first case study focuses on gender as a sociocultural structure; the second, on technological interfaces as media products structures.

Case Study: Gender as Structure

One commonly used approach to SMM interviewing is the “life-line.” In this type of interview the informant is asked to recall a series of events that fit the criteria of the study's research question. Time–space is made to cover the length of the informant's entire life, or at least an extensive period of time. After chronological events have been listed, the informant is asked to select the ones that will be triangulated, which involves using the core set of SMM queries described above. Thus a series of situations from the person's entire life-line are discussed. While the results yield a shallower dig of any one situation than alternative SMM interviewing approaches do, the naming of a series of events provides a looking-glass into the informant's past and present life horizons and into how each given event fits into that whole.

This approach to interviewing was used in Reinhard's (2008) dissertation with the goal of more fully understanding how audiences/users engaged with media products that they saw as gendered: that is, those they saw as meant more for men than for women, and vice versa. In this study the primary structure being investigated was gender as a sociocultural force that works on, through, with, and against agency to determine appropriate behaviors. Gender was studied for how it came into the media reception situation; and this aspect of it was investigated in two ways, both of them from the audience/user's interpretative stance. First, the researcher examined how gender was perceived as impacting people's choices about which media product was more appropriate for men or for women. A second concern was to address how gender was seen by audiences/users as relating to their sense-making during the media engagings. Thus, instead of simply comparing men's and women's engagings and using gender as a predetermined differentiating factor, this study looked at how the participants saw gender as being involved in media engaging situations.

In the study, 21 male and 22 female college students residing in the United States were interviewed using a life-line interview. Participants were asked to list times in their lives when they engaged with media products that they saw as being primarily meant either for men or for women. Participants were also asked to recall times when they engaged with such gendered media products only once or repeatedly. After constructing this list, participants were asked to select one situation from each of these types, and their choice resulted in interviews for four types of media reception situations.

Each media reception situation interview began by asking what led the participant to see that particular media product as gendered. Then, by using the core SMM interviewing template, each situation was examined in greater depth. Further, participants were asked to reflect on how they thought that their responses to each query connected to their life at the time of the media engaging and to what they considered appropriate for men versus women.

Figure 3.3 presents a brief excerpt from an interview conducted with a young male, Ted, about his engaging with a romantic comic book series – a media product he saw as meant more for women. This figure shows how the questions focused on the nature of the media product (the section in white), the experience of engaging with the media product (the sections in light grey), and the follow-up questions (the sections in darker grey).

In order to illustrate how the SMM interviews elicited participant sense-makings with gendered media, we include below direct quotations. Excerpts in this first group exemplify the occasions when men and women discussed what led them to decide that a media product was meant for men (the first two quotations) versus meant for women (the last two quotations).

Figure 3.3 Interview transcript excerpt for participant discussing media meant for women and used only once.

In these quotations the participants were focusing on specific structural features of the media product as attributes relevant to their decision. The structural features of media products that were designed for one gender or another concurred with the assumptions held in US society at the time as to what is appropriate media content for men (action, violence, sex, sports) and what is appropriate media content for women (romance, dating, emotions). However, while participants could readily point to the very structural features that we would assume characterized gendered media, some did so in active resistance. In these cases participants explicitly reported that they were aware that their presence as audience members was not received positively by their society.

Here is a second set of quotations that focus on how men and women regarded what their society and culture says about what is appropriate for men versus women.

In these examples we find each man and woman struggling to accommodate what, on the basis of their gender category membership in society, they've been told was appropriate with some experiences or interpretations from other aspects of their lives.

Of course, these quotations have been taken out of context, so they feature here outside of their relation to other sense-makings/unmakings in the media reception situations, as detailed by the participants. In the brief space allowed here, it is hoped that these quotations demonstrate that, by considering gender as part of the interpretative actions of the audience/user in the media reception situation, we can begin to understand more fully the complex ways in which gender and other sociocultural structures can be influential, inconsequential, contested, and/or contradictory when examined from the vantage point of audience member sense-makings.

Case Study: Media Interface as Structure

Another commonly used SMM interviewing approach is the micro-element interview. From the perspective of how time–space is handled, in this approach the informant essentially skips around time–space within the confines of a particular situation, attending to those micro-moments that come to mind in response to the roster of SMM queries initially applied to the situation as a whole. After this initial triangulation, which is called “level 1,” SMM queries are applied to each of the responses in what is called a “level 2” triangulation. This approach has advantages in that it can more easily make for a shorter or longer interview, depending on how many times the SMM triangulation levels are used. Another major advantage is that this type offers a manageable way to ask an informant to recall a number of situations that are related to each other on several research-based criteria and then to ask informants to compare these situations to each other.

This interviewing approach was applied in our second case study. While this interviewing approach has been commonly used over a 30-year period, this particular study is an unusual application, because it also serves as an example of how SMM can be used as an interviewing approach for data collection within an experiment. SMM has been designed as an interviewing approach applicable to any research situation in which one wishes to understand more fully what others think, feel, need, want, and how they see the connective maps of their worlds. In the research context, SMM is useful for any research application where asking questions of informants is seen as an appropriate means for data collection, be that for surveys, experiments, focus groups, or participant observation. Our argument is that SMM interviews are applicable to experimental data collection because they allow us to understand situationality as it is experienced by our informants, instead of conceptualizing the informants as passive receivers (Reinhard, 2010). This, we suggest, is essential, particularly when one is studying communication processes, because the internalized nature of the meaning-making aspects of communicating always provides the potential for the play of agency.

The intent of this experiment was to compare how informants made sense of four different media product technologies (that is, interfaces) with the same type of content – the superhero genre. This created a within-subjects experimental design, as the experiences with the media product technologies were artificial and imposed upon participants, who had little to no experience with the technologies that were exposed to them. Film was used as a primary quasi-control, as it did not require any physical interactivity; videogame was a secondary quasi-control, because it did require physical interactivity but is not classifiable as a virtual world media product. Two types of virtual worlds, one game-based and one social-based, were the last two media products included in the study.

Each informant engaged in all four media reception situations, and certain aspects of these situations were predetermined: the nature of the media product, the location of the engaging, and the level of the participant's experience with the media product. After each informant had completed these four sessions, a SMM micro-element interview was conducted in order to explore the informant's experiences in and comparisons of the four experimental conditions.

Figure 3.4 below shows the interview structure, as illustrated from Nicolaj's exposure to the Second Life media interface condition. This figure shows how the questions focused on comparing experiences (the section in white) by going in depth into each specific experience with an SMM triangulation level 1 (the sections in light grey) and by pursuing the follow-up triangulation level 2 of asking how the aspects that were the focus of level-1 responses helped and/or hindered (the sections in darker grey).

The example shows that the interviews asked participants to recount what happened in each media engaging and, once these recountings were made, to compare the experiences with each other. In Denmark 14 students and professionals participated in the study; the number was evenly split between men and women within an age range of 17 to 58. Participants had various past experiences to go with these different media product interfaces – a factor that will be taken into account as part of the context of the media reception situation in future reports emphasizing research results. For our purposes here, we illustrate how an SMM interviewing approach allowed us to address the complex intertwinings of structure and agency. To this end, we compare just two participants and their exposures to two different media interfaces: a movie and Second Life.

Figure 3.4 Interview transcript except for informant discussing Second Life interface experience. Source: Reinhard (2010).

The parameters of the experiment allowed the participants to choose, from a library of 15 titles, a movie they had not seen. This made the comparison of movie sessions more difficult across participants, because, while the movies were conceptualized as having the same media interface, the specific content varied. However, from an interpretative perspective, since all the movies focused on “superheroes” and were “new” to informants, the novelty of content in these engagings can be considered reasonably comparable.

Unlike the movie session, the Second Life session was more controlled, in that each informant was required to go to the same place in the virtual world. However, upon arriving at this location, informants were allowed to proceed as they desired. As with the movie, then, the interface was the same, but there were differences in what happened in the virtual world, or in the content.

The two informants we are comparing are Nicolaj, a 31-year-old male whose movie choice was The Incredible Hulk; and Flemming, a 25-year-old male whose movie choice was Elektra. The Second Life site that each informant was asked to visit was “Metrotopia: City of Superheroes,” an island designed specifically for the study.

Looking at how Nicolaj and Flemming made sense of their movie interface experiences, it stands out how Nicolaj, when asked, reported that he faced no gaps in his experiencing of his movie, while Flemming had many questions and confusions.

However, unlike with the movie interface, both Flemming and Nicolaj experienced similar gaps in dealing with the Second Life interface. In fact they both experienced similar problems in controlling objects in the virtual world.

As seen in the previous quotation, Flemming “found” ways of bridging the gap that Nicolaj did not.

Nicolaj also experienced gaps that Flemming did not in his Second Life journey.

Even with these brief clips from some 300 manuscript pages of interview transcriptions from the experiment, we tapped into sense-making variability both within and between conditions that began to allow us to see complex intertwinings – in this case, between media product structures and audience/user agency.

Since our purpose here is to illustrate how we have used SMM interviewing approaches in studying reception processes, there is no room to report study results fully. Suffice it to say that, in general, the experiment elicited evidence regarding how media product interface technologies generally impact sense-making, while it simultaneously began to identify patterns of similarities and differences both within and between participants' experiences and within experimental conditions that contained different interfaces (Reinhard & Dervin, 2010). We consider this to be a modest but helpful beginning to our attempts to understand what audiences/users experience in their media engagings with different kinds of media products.

Conclusions

Our research approach and these interview extracts were informed by Dervin's sense-making methodology metaphor, the core tool that organizes SMM's reliance on a broad spectrum of philosophical sources. SMM does not contest that there are structural aspects of media and life conditions that constrain audience/user interpretations. However, SMM fundamentally accepts that no audience/user interpretation of a media product can be seen a priori, as written in advance, by virtue of knowing something about the nature of the media product, the audience/user, or even the situation. The interpretative acts of the sense-maker always have a potential room to play. The question becomes how to conduct research in ways that allow us simultaneously to address, in systematic fashion, both the a priori constraint and the interpretative play.

SMM's approach to studying media reception situations has begun to provide us with the ability to understand the conditionality of the influence of structures in media reception situations. The case studies illustrate this understanding. These studies did not assume that a priori structural differences of gender and interface would determine the outcome of the media reception situation. Instead they sought to bring out the agency of audiences/users, as these made sense of the situations. In this way we have been able to begin to identify the conditions in which factors like gender or interface matter in determining media reception outcomes, as well as how they matter, and even why.

Of course, SMM has limitations; all research approaches do. The deep qualitative interviews can make analysis time-consuming; the amount of material gathered can appear daunting whether the analytical procedure is qualitative or quantitative. Even though SMM has been used in large-scale studies, typically fewer deep qualitative interviews are collected, in order to reduce analysis time. This strategy, of course, lends itself to criticisms of reduced generalizability. Further, as with other methodologies reliant on self-report, some critics challenge that SMM interviews are based on trusting audiences/users to “truthfully” and “completely” recall their experiences. While SMM's philosophical and methodological edifice has been designed to address this challenge and in fact positions it as philosophically inappropriate, it is the kind of challenge launched against all retrospective interview data. Another frequent criticism, usually originating from those who adhere to more classical political economic and cultural studies assumptions, is that SMM is like “motivational” research, because of how it elides on its metaphorical bridge such usual research categories as values, memories, attitudes, opinions, and affect. Again, SMM's methodological foundations, drawing on sources from philosophy, neuroscience, and complexity theory, argues explicitly against these expert categorizations imposed on everyday experience.

In sum, then, we argue that SMM has given us a more holistic ability to study audience/user engagings with media products. It has helped us to understand the complexity of intertwining factors that are involved in media reception and to go beyond solitary-factor explanations. We have been able to more completely disentangle these factors while simultaneously understanding how they interact, as well as how they can be traced backwards, forwards, and sideways into the everyday lives of audiences/users.

Our work in applying SMM to study media reception situations has only just begun, but we have collected sufficient data on a variety of situations to suggest the promise of the journey. In addition to the data collections described here, as examples, we have applied SMM to the study of what audiences/users see as their media guilty pleasures, as their addictions to video and computer games, and as the lessons they learned from media characters about society and how society works.

What leads us to continue on this research trajectory is the emerging wealth and depth of the data obtained, which flesh out these situations and the extraordinary reports of human experiences within them. We do not argue for SMM as “the” research approach for reception studies. Indeed, built into SMM's philosophical edifice is the proposition that we must surround the phenomena of our interest with every research tool possible. In this sense, we position SMM as a complement and a supplement.

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