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Reflexivity in Data Analysis

Constructing Narratives of Family Digital Media Use In, Through, and For Public Engagement

Lynn Schofield Clark

Introduction

As my own children have entered their pre-teen years, I have come to have more in common with the families of pre-teens and teens that have been at the center of my interview-based and observational research for more than ten years. What I've become interested in recently includes not only how technology is coming to play a role in the everyday lives of families, but how parents and teens understand the role of technologies in their lives. I'm also concerned about how our research contributes to – or could contribute to – those understandings. In other words, I want to know more about the discourses that shape and inform how people approach the “problem” of technologies in the home, and how we as researchers might contribute new directions to that discourse.

In this chapter, therefore, I present a case study of how a particular narrative that emerged in my research project “Teens & the New Media @ Home” became meaningful in different public contexts that included parents, young people, and members of my own research community. I present here the story of how I worked on the analysis of this narrative and in the process became aware of my own biases and intentions. I also discuss how I became aware of the different assumptions that shaped and ultimately determined how various audiences interpreted the narrative and gave it meaning. From this I make the argument that, as qualitative media researchers become more familiar with how our research narratives are received by differing audiences, we can consider how to present our work in such a way that it contributes best to public discussions and to public culture by reframing debates about the role of the media in family lives and in society. Thus, to frame this study, I begin by considering how critical cultural studies media audience researchers are currently thinking about what it means to be reflexive researchers, and I conclude with considerations on how such reflexivity – specifically about what we write, for whom, and why – might better enable us to understand the roles that we are positioned to play in contributing to the direction of the dominant discourses surrounding media in US family life today.

The Rise of Reflexivity in Media Audience and in Qualitative Methods Research

There's a certain irony in the fact that we as audience researchers haven't always been very reflexive about how we interact with our own audiences. As Patrick Murphy (2008) noted in his review of the evolution of media user or “audience” studies, the field has gone through four distinct phases in relation to qualitative research methods.

The “interpretive turn” of the mid-1980s, he argues, was largely the work of feminists who were striving to challenge the frameworks of textual criticism that emphasized how media auteurs constructed meaning and intended their works to be understood. Feminist scholars were also interested in contesting elite critics' interpretations of media texts and policymakers' efforts to police and control the media environment (for early examples of the interpretive turn, see Ang, 1995; Morley, 1980; Radway, 1984). The earliest approaches to qualitative media audience research, Murphy argues, were expository: they sought to grasp things from “the natives' point of view,” to cite anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Researchers such as James Lull (1980), Andrea Press (1989), and Thomas Tufte (2000) wanted to tell richer stories about different kinds of audiences and about their varied engagement with media in their everyday lives. Yet, Murphy observed, the researchers often seemed to disappear in the process. Researchers are slightly more visible in what he termed the observational style of S. Elizabeth Bird (1992a, 1992b, 2003) and Sonia Livingstone (2002, 2010), both of whom more clearly allow interviewees greater control over the research encounter.

By the middle of the 1990s, a third style of qualitative media research and writing had emerged: the style that Murphy terms the interactive, which was dialogical in nature, incorporating “a mixture of narrative, polyvocality, contextual information, and reflexivity” (Murphy, 2008, p. 280). Gillespie's (1995) work on British Indian families watching television in London was one example, and work by Kim (2006) and Acosta-Alzuru (2005) also embodied this approach. Interactive researchers recognized that we needed to locate ourselves in the field when writing up our research narratives, and this usually meant paying attention to the researcher's intersecting positions on race/ethnicity, class, and gender, among other things (Chavez, 2008; Clifford & Marcus, 1986). It also meant recognizing, as Erving Goffman (1959) reminded us in the middle of the twentieth century, that the stories people tell through their words and actions are part of a performance that a person or a set of people enact as a channel for communicating who they are and why they do what they do. This doesn't mean that the stories we hear in research settings aren't true; it just means that, as researchers, we need to be mindful of the fact that they are told for a reason. The teller may want to “get my story out there,” or she may want to help a researcher (or help herself) by trying to tell the story she thinks the researcher wants to hear (Stoller, 2005). For instance, when studying how parents and their children talked about media use in their homes, my colleagues and I observed that parents relied upon “public scripts” about media, as they offered us what we termed “accounts of the media” (Alters & Clark, 2004). As we wrote:

In other words, whenever parents told us what their families did regarding media within the household, their stories were inflected with the knowledge that they were accountable, as parents, for maintaining some control over their children's media environment. Because they wanted to present themselves as good and responsible parents, they shared many concerns about the violence, sex, and stereotypes they saw and heard in mainstream media, and they told stories that tended to overstate their interventions into the media lives of their children (even as the children sometimes agreed with, sometimes contradicted, and sometimes simply misunderstood their parents' intentions).

This particular chapter grows out of concerns with public scripts in my earlier research and aims to contribute to what Murphy describes as the fourth phase of qualitative media research – what he terms the reflexive approach. In Murphy's definition, “reflexive” research involves “the observation of participation” and ruminations on the processes of representation itself, as seen in work by Kraidy (1999), La Pastina (2006), and Parameswaran (2001), among others. According to Murphy (2008), this latter style of ethnographic writing “invokes personal experience as a way to push the limits of difference and explore the boundaries of and potential for identification in a manner that asserts a political and ethical commitment to understanding how power operates” (p. 281). This reflexive approach points the lens toward the researchers and the “public scripts” that shape the researcher's own manner of telling stories, recognizing that we all speak through existing narratives. It also recognizes that some narratives, such as those related to certain racial/ethnic, gender, and class positions, are “coded as ‘good science,’” as sociologist Michelle Fine (1994) has noted (see also Mayer, 2005).

Within this reflexive approach, it's important to acknowledge that those of us who are professors, scholars, and even college students are now or may become members of what sociologists Barbara and John Ehrenreich (1977) termed “the professional/managerial class.” Power and responsibility accompany this cultural position. As organizations, politicians, journalists, marketers, and others seek the attention of the professional/managerial class, the needs, desires, and assumptions of this group come to have consequences in the “real world”: they influence, among other things, the ways in which teachers teach, the ways in which labor and childcare are arranged and managed, the ways in which healthcare is sought and disbursed, and the ways in which newspapers represent problems. Therefore, even as we contest certain cultural narratives in our work, those of us who write research narratives may inadvertently protect other cultural assumptions, as Mayer (2005) and Seiter (1990) have each pointed out.

For example, it is important for scholars to recognize that their work operates in relation to power and can serve to construct versions of “good parenting” that support certain norms of middle-class life. As we seek to draw connections between our scholarship and the concerns of public life, we can become engaged in what Nikolas Rose (1999) has termed the governance project of neoliberalism, transferring the responsibility for parenting wholly to individual parents and absolving the public and the government of any responsibility for providing supportive structures for family life. This is further complicated by the fact that parents, policymakers, and educators often seek advice about how adults should handle media in relation to young people, and this often shapes a media scholar's invitation to speak publicly in the first place.

We need to become aware of our own biases and of the very human tendency to want to protect our own interests, as prior reflexive researchers have noted. Yet we cannot fail to notice that our cultural position also affords us opportunities to critically evaluate existing discourses and to do our part, when possible, to participate in challenging them. The question is: how do we do this effectively when it seems that much of the public criticism of the media is out of step with our own?

As scholars, we have been socialized to produce what Hills (2002) has termed “institutionally acceptable forms of knowledge” primarily for academic audiences (p. xil). However, I want to highlight the fact that our potential audiences include not only the scholars who read our work in scholarly journals; as our work becomes part of a larger knowledge base that shapes the questions to be asked and the concerns to be addressed in public life, our broader audiences may include parents, college students, policymakers, educators, and many others we might not even anticipate. In other words, our audience may, and probably should, include members of the broader public who are also concerned about the role of the media in social change and in everyday life. Hence I'd like to suggest that scholars should explore how the various constituencies of which we are a part understand the stories we tell about those who live in a highly mediatized world. We must consider that the narratives we create may become part of the cultural repertoire that shapes how others think about and experience digital and mobile media in their everyday lives (Swidler, 1986). Such contemplation about the forces and contexts that surround research becomes an ethical concern, then: we need to be reflexive not only about our biases and our positionalities as analysts and writers of research, but also as producers of knowledge whose narratives of research inevitably enter into dialogue with narratives that existed before our research. These narratives can frame how our research will come to have meaning among various constituents.

Having a foot in the worlds of parenting, college teaching, and scholarly research, and hearing how digital and mobile media are discussed in these various settings, I am reminded of what Annette Markham (2009) has referred to as the multiplicities that can emerge when we strive to be accountable for the stories we tell. My own analysis becomes more partial and hesitant, but – I hope – also more nuanced for taking into consideration the many ways in which different people have a stake in how stories are told, to whom, and for what ends. I want to become more reflexive about how the narratives of research that I want to craft acquire their meanings within different contexts. And this, in turn, will highlight the responsibilities that a researcher has today as she makes choices regarding which stories to tell, how to tell them, for whom, and with what consequences.

In the next section, therefore, I share the narrative of Kayla's story and its interpretations, highlighting the contexts in which this particular research narrative becomes meaningful. I also show how research comes to have meaning as the result of collaborative conversations between researchers and a host of people we meet in our professional and personal lives, who help us make sense of our work. Of course, we don't usually think of college students and of our neighbors and friends as collaborators in the analysis of our data; we don't think that way even of our academic colleagues most of the time. As academic researchers, however, even when we speak casually to other peer researchers, we are inevitably opening ourselves up to interactions that shape our findings and our awareness of what audiences might expect from our research.

How Research Is Made Meaningful: The Story of Kayla's Story

“Can you believe she said that??!” my college-aged research colleague Caroline exclaimed as we read the transcript of the interview she'd done the day before with an 18-year-old high school senior. The young woman she'd interviewed, who we'd called Kayla, had stated that giving up her iPhone and Facebook account would be akin to “losing something very dear to me, like a baby or something.” Caroline was surprised by Kayla's impassioned response because she knew that Kayla had had very negative experiences online with ex-friends and ex-boyfriends who had taunted her and had posted mean messages for her to see. To hear Kayla speak of her online activities as if they were a positive and meaningful part of her life came as something of a shock to Caroline, and she believed that Kayla's embeddedness in digital and mobile media would be of great interest to me as a researcher looking at teen and parental practices around these things.

But, in spite of my young colleague's surprise, Kayla's comment about how important social media were to her was not a completely unexpected or inexplicable statement to me, given the existing research on the topic. Researchers such as Danah Boyd (2008), Susannah Stern (2007), and Amanda Lenhart (2002, 2007, 2010) have long been discussing the crucial role that mobile media and social networking sites have come to play in the lives of US teens. By 2009 research had demonstrated that more than 95% of households with children had cell phones and that more than 65 billion text messages were sent in one month alone (Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) Semi-Annual Wireless Survey, 2008; Lenhart, 2010). We know that teens don't differentiate between online and offline communication with their friends; they rather view their online practices as an extension of their social lives, and thus they live out what concerns them most in both places (Watkins, 2009). So I listened to Caroline and other members of my student research team as they discussed what they found interesting in Kayla's story – the story of a young woman completely immersed in digital and mobile media. Yet I also recognized, somewhat sadly, that an analysis emphasizing Kayla's emotional attachment to digital and mobile media would verify what others had already found rather than contributing something new to the conversation. And, as a researcher, I was expected to do the latter.

For me, what was more surprising and compelling in Caroline's conversation with Kayla occurred later in the interview, when Kayla was asked why she thought her mother and father didn't have any rules to govern her rather excessive and self-destructive mobile and digital media use. “They just don't care as much as other parents,” she said with a shrug. Why, I wondered, would a teen like Kayla give lack of caring as an explanation for her parents' lack of rules governing digital and mobile media use? From the rest of her interview, it did seem that Kayla's parents didn't place many restrictions on her mobile and digital media use. But there were many young people in our sample who had similarly minimal restrictions, especially among the older teens we had interviewed. Most of the time during our interviews with them, older teens with few restrictions on their digital and mobile media use had responded with a comment akin to the one made by 16-year-old Montana. Montana's mother knew little about what her daughter did online, but, as Montana noted, “my mom teaches us what is right and wrong but she doesn't set limits 'cause she trusts me.” Trust, not lack of caring, was the common theme that had emerged in how older teens and their parents discussed the rules governing digital and mobile media use (Clark, 2009). And in fact Kayla's mother did talk about how she trusted Kayla to make the right choices. Or at least she wanted to trust Kayla, in spite of the fact that Kayla had engaged in cyberbullying and cyberstalking, had posted online numerous unflattering photos and comments about being drunk or engaging in other risky behaviors, and had generally spent so much time online and texting that she'd almost failed out of school. Were Kayla's parents more tuned out than they seemed to be? Was Kayla just a troubled kid? Was no other explanation needed? And what difference would it make if, as I later came to conclude, Kayla's complaints about her parents' apathy were calculated to gain the researcher's sympathy?

At the time when we were first analyzing the interviews, I believed that I was focusing on the second comment because it was so different from what I'd heard among other teens, and thus it could lead to new insights, worth sharing in research settings. Later I came to see what seems now obvious: the comment about her parents stood out for me, at least in part, because I am a parent, and I am situated in narratives of parenting that would react to such a statement with disbelief, as if it were not a true statement (e.g., “Kayla is lying, and of course her parents care; she's just trying to get Caroline's sympathy”), or, even worse, with judgment (“well, if her parents don't care, then that explains why her life is such a mess”). I didn't think that either of those approaches constituted a sufficient or compelling explanation for Kayla's attachment to digital and mobile media and for the irreplaceable role they had come to play in her life.

Caroline had suggested that she interview Kayla when she'd be working with my research team on the Teens & the New Media @ Home research project, an interview-based and observational research effort that extended nearly over a 10-year period. The project, which included close to 300 in-depth interviews with teens, preteens, and their parents, had occasionally relied upon younger research team-members to identify and interview participants of high school age.¹ Caroline and Kayla had been co-workers, and Caroline sensed that Kayla, who was four years her junior, looked up to her. It wasn't surprising, then, that Kayla created a narrative about her digital and mobile media use that sought to garner Caroline's sympathy. Caroline also knew that Kayla's father and mother had divorced and that Kayla's father had become increasingly distant from his daughter, despite her obvious admiration for him and her tendency to glorify him while denigrating her caretaking single-parent mother. A lot of Kayla's acting out through digital and mobile media seemed to be an effort to gain the attention that she was lacking, in Caroline's view.²

My own response to Kayla's story wasn't initially as sympathetic as Caroline's. She reminded me of my own onetime “best friend” Beth, a physically beautiful young woman whose flair for drama, desperate need for attention, and tendency toward self-destruction meant that at any moment those closest to her could become the target of her meanness. In Kayla I saw a young woman who had shown poor judgment time and again. She had been both a perpetrator and a victim of cyberbullying. She had been disloyal and cruel to people she claimed were her friends; her best friend Rhonda became her ex-best friend when Kayla slept with Rhonda's boyfriend.

I also recognized Kayla for the kind of young woman whom my own mother would have labeled a “troublemaker.” In addition to her relational troubles, Kayla had been threatened with expulsion from school because she'd refused to take down from Facebook photos of herself that flaunted sexual innuendo as well as the use of illegal drugs and alcohol. As a parent, I knew that, if my own daughter had a friend like Kayla, I'd be worried. And, if my daughter started acting out as Kayla did, I'd know that I had a serious problem on my hands.³

As I started to talk about Kayla's story among my own circle of (mostly non-academic) friends, I noticed that their initial response to the story echoed my own. Those who were parents tended to sympathize with Kayla's mother and father. They knew moms who were similarly exasperated by daughters who seemed unreachable, or they had felt that way about their own child at one time or another. If they had been a “Kayla” themselves at an earlier point in their lives, they had even greater empathy for what Kayla's parents were going through. And, if they were parents of younger children, as many of my personal friends are, Kayla's story triggered worry. What was it about the technology and/or about Kayla's earlier life that had made her more vulnerable to such self-destructiveness, they wondered – and what could they do to help their own children to avoid a similar fate? I realized that part of the reason why Kayla's story seemed so compelling to me was that I was positioned as these worrier-parents are: that is, unable to avert my eyes from Kayla and identifying, in alternation, with her victims and with her parents.

Then I told Kayla's story to my college students. I found that college students empathized with Kayla, recalling their own struggles with being cyberbullied or reliving the shame of having been perpetrators. They related to the way in which Kayla talked about the importance of connecting with others through digital and mobile media. They related to her choices, too; what I had seen as cruel and self-destructive behavior, they described as characteristics of what they argued were “normal” risk-taking behaviors in teen culture. They noted that risk taking was a way of establishing oneself as desirable, adventurous, and exciting. They also noted that excluding others (even friends) in dramatic ways was a means of making a claim for attention and popularity. Their analyses echoed those of social scientists who have explored why young people engage in risk-taking behaviors (Lying, 1990; Cohen & Taylor, 1992; Douglas, 1992; Lupton, 1999).

The college students who heard Kayla's story also related to her sense that her parents had no idea about her experiences: “My mom didn't know what was going on a lot of the time either,” 20-year-old Meghan said, noting that her mother, like Kayla's, regularly combined the names of the two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and myspace, incorrectly referring to “MyFace.” College student Meghan said that she too, like Kayla, had hidden many of her riskier practices from her parents even as she'd widely shared them among her peers online. Meghan and her peers didn't believe Kayla when she claimed that her mother and father didn't care, but they didn't think that was a particularly poignant or meaningful statement from Kayla, either. In fact my interlocutors of college age read my concern as that of a worried parent, or at least as that of someone they needed to reassure. I shouldn't blame either the technology or the parents, they told me – as if my adopting one or the other position were behind the fact that I was telling Kayla's story from my research in the first place. Which in turn made me question why exactly I was telling the story.

Researchers of digital and mobile media related to Kayla's story in yet a different way. “New media can be so isolating,” one colleague said, shaking her head as she placed Kayla's story of digital media overuse squarely in the realm of behavioral studies that tend to see technologies as creating problems for individuals and for society. Another colleague, situated within the critical/cultural studies tradition of research, as I am, raised an interesting question, but he also identified himself as “blissfully unaware” of the fears of parenting – a not-so-subtle reminder that research into parenting is definitely not a hip topic in academia and is sometimes viewed as inherently conservative. “But she seems like an awfully extreme case,” yet another skeptical critical/cultural studies colleague protested. This colleague questioned both how I was interpreting Kayla's story and whether or not I should tell it at all. He argued that Kayla's story could reinforce concerns about digital media causing stress and harm among individuals. Such stories tend to gloss over broader concerns of inequitable distribution of digital access, he suggested. Another colleague agreed, pointing out that stories like Kayla's can overwhelm any consideration about the possible positive uses of digital and mobile media in young peoples' lives – and that, this colleague felt, was the kind of research that parents, educators, and policymakers especially needed to hear from the research community right now.

So what was the story that I wanted tell, and why was I interested in telling it? Caroline's explanation, rooted to some extent in the logic of family systems therapy, explained why Kayla's actions served to worry her mother, to get her father's (and everyone else's) attention, and to garner her a reputation among her peers as an adventurous and dramatic risk taker. Her actions were understandable given their currency within her peer culture, as my college students had pointed out, even as they were also made comprehensible in light of parental worries and within the framework of “dangerous media/vulnerable children” that researchers, policymakers, and journalists tend to reinforce for parents. In fact the only community where her story didn't fit was my own primary scholarly home of cultural studies and reception research scholars, who prefer stories of active and creative digital and mobile media users to stories of pain and self-destructive behavior. This lack of fit is what probably made her story particularly compelling to me as a parent with insider knowledge about how both parents and researchers might respond to it.

As I tried to grapple with the different ways in which parents and young people approached Kayla's story, I was struck by the paradoxes of life in contemporary US society that are reflected in this story. We all want the bonds of community and meaningful relationships, as well as the time to attend to the people who matter to us. This is what's at the root both of parents' concerns for their young children and of the desire of young people like Kayla to remain connected to their peers at all times, even if such connections are painful. Yet the demands of the economy drive us to value efficiency and speed, and to appreciate the importance of “looking out for number one,” or of creating our own “personal brand” in order to compete in the global order (Peters, 1997). Thus we employ technologies in our lives in order to maintain and improve relationships with those who are most important to us, even as our use of those technologies feeds the engine that, in turn, drives technology companies to produce new technologies that are faster, smaller, and less expensive and make life more efficient and paced faster than ever before. And we rely upon the media tropes of celebrity and upon the commercial realm to reinforce who we are for ourselves and for others, so that young women like Kayla learn to act like a “star” in the drama that is her own life – often in ways that can undermine her other, more relational goals. Kayla's story of “live fast, die young, leave a trail of glory online in your wake” is part of an old story of the celebration of youth in Western culture, and it is also part of a more contemporary cultural message: it reveals what it means to grow up in the context of a digital age in which technologies enable meaningful relationships even as they can also exacerbate and undermine our ability to maintain those meaningful relationships. Perhaps we need so desperately to give precedence to the importance of relationships in our lives because it feels as if our ability to shore up those relationships is constantly under siege.

And there is a responsibility for the researcher, then, in how Kayla's story is told and what it might come to mean in various settings. I believe that many cultural studies and critical scholars seek to call attention to the paradoxes and dilemmas of everyday life and to the role that technology plays in those dilemmas. We are interested in “the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed” (Morningstar, 1993). We hope that our research might help others to better understand how certain taken-for-granted cultural practices come to be valued and repeated not because they're reasonable or because they will actually help us meet our goals (achieve the life we want, or reach the society we want), but because they are part of a commonsense way of doing things that, upon reflection, tend to benefit the status quo and reflect our culture's darker side (Swidler, 1986).

Kayla's story can therefore speak to the concerns of parents, young people, and scholars, even if it raises more questions than it answers. Stories like Kayla's can remind those of us in critical/cultural and qualitative media studies that we don't always acknowledge the pain and disappointment that can be a part of parenting and of childhood. Because we don't foreground these key issues, we are not always prepared to consider how fears of these things shape the anxieties people bring into their considerations of the role of the media in our everyday lives. If critical/cultural studies scholars want to move the debate in the direction of considering the opportunities as well as the risks of digital media, we need to take seriously the fact that concerns about both positive and negative personal and interpersonal experiences inevitably guide the ways in which people approach the role of media in everyday life. Thus I believe that stories like Kayla's are important because they provide an opening for discussion. When we recognize, together with the audience of parents, educators, and policymakers, that young people like Kayla need support and are seeking relationships and are doing so ineffectively, then we can also raise the question of contrast: how do other young people learn to utilize digital and mobile media so as to gain support more positively, and so as to develop good relationships? Rather than allowing our interlocutors to counter us with questions about the “problem of the media,” therefore, we are participating in reframing that question in terms of how media are situated in relation to shared hopes and goals. As scholars, we may find a more receptive and broader audience when we acknowledge, rather than overlook, the felt experience of our audiences.

By recognizing and speaking to existing concerns about childhood fears and disappointments, an analysis that addresses digital and mobile media use within a stratified society can also take a different direction. Rather than viewing digital media along the lines of a “digital divide” or deficiency model, in which some have privilege and others are lacking it, we can bring to the fore adult concerns about addressing children's negative choices that span the economic spectrum. This foregrounds children's agency while also drawing attention to those young people and families that find ways of working within their own contexts. How they do so then becomes particularly interesting and helps to reframe the conversation, transforming it from one of individual choice into one of structural limitations. This, in turn, raises new questions, such as: How are our society's focus on efficiency and our subsequent use of digital and mobile media creating challenges that are greater for the more disadvantaged families than for the middle-class ones – and also different in kind?

One relevant example of how we as scholars might participate in and contribute to a publicly-minded research that reframes debates about media effects comes from the field of family studies in the US. Frustrated with the ways in which conservative think-tanks were defining women's roles in the workforce as a problem in US society, social historian Stephanie Coontz and her colleagues formed the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) in 1996 (Council on Contemporary Families, n.d). This organization is dedicated to raising the awareness of sociological research among ordinary families and to providing the press, educators, and the public with the latest research from professional demographers, economists, family therapists, political scientists, and sociologists (among others). When an issue arises in public life, the organization proactively solicits experts who can write editorials or news releases about their research to counter conservative and reactionary positions. When the US census decided to allow greater differentiation in the reporting of race and ethnicity, for instance, two sociologists wrote a news report, which CCF released, about dispelling stereotypes regarding Hispanic/Latino families; this way they made their views widely available to journalists. Such work takes an activist orientation toward the news media and is accomplished through the efforts of a collective group of citizens, who come together in order to address their concerns about the direction of public debate in terms that the news media recognize. Each year the CCF holds a conference and invites scholars to contribute to its annual issue of Unconventional Wisdom – a report that collates findings on topics of interest within public realms, such as “Do Babies Make Marriages Better or Worse?”; “Does the College Hookup Scene Mean the End of Commitment?”; or “Do Children of Two-Parent Families Succeed More than Children of Single-Parent Families?” The work of the CCF is not without controversy, particularly as the members of the CCF sometimes challenge the work of prestigious and well-funded scholars within their own field. Yet over the years the consistency and quality of the work of its members has contributed to the organization's credibility among journalists, policymakers, and members of the public. At the same time members have also become better at articulating how their research addresses contemporary concerns, thus making their work more amenable to external funding organizations and to arguments about the success of knowledge transfer between academics and the public.

The report on UK media and families by Sonia Livingstone and Ranjana Das (2010) offers an excellent example of an approach that begins by addressing public concerns and then goes on to reframe the debate it occurs in. After an introduction that acknowledges that media have become thoroughly embedded in the everyday lives of European families, the report opens with a section titled “What Are Media Effects?” A brief yet conclusive review of the literature ends by noting that media effects are rarely supported by evidence in a straightforward way, and that media effects depend on a complex range of factors that may be hard to predict or control. The report then moves the discussion toward a consideration of how various factors interrelate in the actual media experiences of families, effectively addressing them and then identifying the widely accepted assumptions regarding media that one finds among policymakers, parents, journalists, and others. I believe that, if we wish to gain a wider audience for our research, we need to address the issues underlying the broad concerns with media impact continuously and systematically, in our own research as well as in our collective work as members of a field of study.

Rigorous Research and the Work of Interpretation

“So, do you bring institutional review board (IRB) forms with you when you go to your friends' houses?” a colleague joked when I mentioned the subject of this article to him. I don't; but, as Elaine Lally (2002) noted about the use of humor, the joke highlights contradictions in the approach to research that I am advocating. In other words, “this isn't really research, and you're not going to claim it is, right?” – the colleague might have said. Or perhaps he might have objected that such reliance upon friends, colleagues, and students for data analysis is not a “rigorous” form of analysis. But rigor is a term that has come under debate in much social scientific research in recent years. “Traditional modernist research has focused on rigor to the neglect of the dynamics of the lived world,” as researchers Joe Kincheloe and Peter McLaren (1998, p. 287) argued. Trustworthiness, they suggested, is a more appropriate word in critical qualitative research. They advocate a comparative approach to analysis, noting that, “through their knowledge of a variety of comparable contexts, researchers begin to learn their similarities and differences – they learn from their comparisons of different contexts” (p. 287).

Being immersed in a field, becoming an expert, is part of a long tradition in anthropology that has yielded rich ethnographic analyses. That's the tradition of anthropologists from Bronislaw Malinowski to Clifford Geertz to Michael Wesch's recent forays into the anthropology of YouTube. United States sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier and Robert Park have also engaged in this kind of close-up, in-depth research, a tradition carried on notably in recent years in the sociological work of Barbara Ehrenreich, Arlie Hochschild, and Harriet Pipes McAdoo. These and other scholars have argued that, in order to produce credible accounts, researchers must live in a culture until they feel they know what's going on, and then they must live there some more, until they start to see its contradictions. The kind of knowledge that gets generated in this approach is up close and empathic, and it “rings true” or finds comparability among audiences.

Baym (2009) has similarly argued, following Montgomery and Baxter (1998), that “the goal [of qualitative research] is comparability and the ability to offer analyses that can be coordinated with others” (p. 175). For qualitative researchers, this means that the process of engaging in research comes to include not only interviews, observations, or other forms of data gathering and analysis, but continuous explorations of the larger cultural context in which the data gathering has occurred and will occur. Therefore conducting and analyzing interviews is only one part of the process of engaging in rigorous qualitative research, because, between formal interviews, we are thinking through our research questions and placing our own ongoing interpretations in conversation with other things we encounter along the way.

Hence, when we agree to present our research at academic conferences or to speak at public gatherings, we are disciplining ourselves to come up with an organized way of talking to others about what we think we're seeing, and then we have the opportunity to notice how others – our audiences – respond to what we say. Perhaps a key mark on the road to rigor, then, is that, if our stories are compelling, members of our audience will want and even feel compelled to talk to us afterwards, sharing their own stories or experiences in order to underscore our insights or to illuminate something about their own. In those instances we know that we have found comparability, or some way for others to relate their own knowledge (whether researched, lived, or some combination of the two) with what we've said.

But comparability is not the only attribute of rigorous research in today's context, just as self-revelation is not the only attribute of reflexive approaches. As researchers, we don't need to speak for those who have less access to making such contributions to public life, but we can speak up for them, as Cope (2008) has argued in her discussion of the role of the scholarly advocate in publicly engaged research. Moreover, as Fine (1994) has argued: “If we recognize race, class, gender, and sexuality to be socially and historically contingent, then silence, retreat, and engagement all pose ethical dilemmas. All are tangled with ethics of knowing, writing, and acting” (p. 152). Thus, as researchers, we are positioned not only to have access, but to bear the responsibility for how we will speak up, and to what ends.

I came to realize that the reason I wanted to tell Kayla's story was not to garner sympathy for her or for her parents, but to recognize the difficulties of adolescent life and of teen–parent relations, which often give a particular shape to how families experience digital and mobile media in their lives. I wanted to draw attention to how these new media can provide encouragement for young people as they foreground self-branding, self- or celebrity-building through dramatic online encounters, and the felt need to be in constant contact others, often to the detriment of their relational goals. I also wanted to draw attention to the fact that parents have largely accepted the public script that says that it is the individual responsibility of parents to nurture and support young people through these difficulties, that they do so in order to guarantee their economic place in society, and that we must not expect much in the way of public programs that will support our interpersonal or familial goals. In short, I wanted to connect the needs of both young people and parents, as expressed in their relation to digital and mobile media, with those of an economic system that says that we must promote ourselves and think of our relationships instrumentally and efficiently, and that we should overlook the fact that, throughout history, families have benefitted from strong legislative policies that make it easier to balance work and family life than the ones in place in US society today. I therefore saw Kayla's narrative as one that opened rather than closed dialogues. Sharing her narrative has enabled me to speak up for the need that all young people and the adults in their lives have for strong relationships, and for societal structures that encourage rather than hinder those relationships. A simple story like Kayla's can therefore create an opening for making connections between media studies and widespread concerns about how family structures are changing in light of economic pressures, and it can allow media studies to speak to broader issues of significant import in our collective lives.

Conclusion: On the Role of Media Studies in Public Life

As a parent who is studying parenting practices in relation to digital and mobile media, I'm constantly reminded of how much the public debate about childhood and media is structured around the “culture of fear” context typical of the US, given our culture's tendency to see things outside our immediate domestic context as threatening and in need of containment. I have enjoyed the challenge of trying to understand how to take parental concerns with the seriousness they deserve while also attempting to draw attention to the ways in which talk of digital and mobile media becomes imbricated in what Ehrenreich (1990) has described as the “fear of falling” out of the middle class (through lost job opportunities, inferior education, or too much counterproductive distraction) and in the mantra of personal instead of collective responsibility.

Many of us who enter a life of scholarly inquiry do so because we believe that we want to contribute to what Giroux (1992, p. 10) has termed “a public mission of making society more democratic.” Many of us want to see ourselves as “champions for the silenced and excluded groups in our society,” and thus we want our scholarship to address concerns we believe we share with members of the public. Yet at some point we, as scholars, come to grips with the fact that the world is a complicated place and that, if it were easy to solve the world's problems, someone would have already done it. So what, then? Do we decide that we should give up on research and writing and become activists? Do we decide that we need to find our teeny niche within our field and hammer away within it, as a safe career move? Do we find we need to coin a phrase so that, even if our ideas aren't new, we can be credited with starting a new strain of research? Each of these approaches seems to shortchange the possibilities for research as a contributor to social change, even in our day of more humbling assessments of the contribution of research to public life.

What seems to me to be the relevant challenge is gaining an understanding of how our very small piece of the puzzle fits into a larger puzzle, so that, whereas our research can't answer every question, it can contribute to a larger conversation. Beginning with this humbler goal of contributing to an ongoing conversation, we can then be more conscious, or more reflexive, about which conversations we want to contribute to, and how.

In today's world, scholars need to earn the right to be heard in public life. We need to consider the questions we ask from the perspective of the most pressing issues that our subjects face: in the case of the parents and young people I've studied, this includes considering how to deal with conflict and stress in family life – both with the problems that are exacerbated by digital and mobile media and with the frustrations and tensions that can be remedied through use of digital and mobile media to strengthen our connections to one another.

If conducting rigorous qualitative research has come to mean an appreciation for how our research is read and understood, or for how it “plays” among different audiences, then taking responsibility for what it might come to mean in those various settings is an important part of our research task today. Publicly-minded research must consider how research narratives can either reinforce dominant perspectives or challenge existing discourses. In the case of research addressed to parents, I believe we can challenge the helicopter-parent concern (which is related to teen vulnerability), the story of an individual's culpability in disastrous personal outcomes, the hopelessness that might surround a story such as Kayla's, and, most importantly of all, we can reinforce the need for empathy for all young people and our support for parents in their efforts to nurture and raise their children.

NOTES

1 The Teens & the New Media @ Home project had its start at the University of Colorado, where I served as co-principal investigator on the Symbolism, Meaning, & the New Media @ Home in-depth interview-based research project. From 2001 to 2006 I conducted and oversaw interviews and collaborated on interpretation and analysis with my colleague Stewart Hoover and a number of excellent research associates including Monica Emerich, Curtis Coats, Diane Alters, Joe Champ, Christof Demot-Heinrich, Scott Webber, Michelle Miles, Jin Park, AnnaMaria Russo, Kati Lustyik, Denice Walker, and Dan Mercado, who worked on an undergraduate honors research project on the topic. In 2006 the project moved with me to the University of Denver, where I was fortunate to work with research assistants Rachel Monserrate, Alexis Lynn, Art Bamford, Colette Holst, Caroline Davidson, Deidre Helton, Jill Dierberg, and Nik Vukovich.

2 As of this writing, Kayla's Facebook profile features her cradling a bottle of vodka under one arm as she drunkenly grasps a friend's shoulder.

3 As a professor, I admired Caroline's compassionate response to Kayla's story, and together we talked about the responsibilities of telling Kayla's story and Caroline's own responsibilities to Kayla, given Kayla's obvious personal problems.

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