16

Using Ethnography to Understand Everyday Media Practices in Australian Family Life

Donell Holloway and Lelia Green

Introduction

A lot of times, the kids will ring us during the week and say “I've got an assignment to do, I've got to use the Internet,” so I go, pick them up and they do their assignments here. (Jasmine, divorced mother of school-aged children who live predominantly with their father)

(Green & Holloway, 2004, p. 180)

This chapter addresses the notion of audience studies from an Australian perspective and, specifically, from the perspective of Australian audience studies researchers who embrace an ethnographic approach. Like researchers in other countries and regions, Australian audience studies researchers adopt a range of philosophical and methodological approaches. In focusing here upon ethnographic methodology, the authors do not intend to imply that this is the only appropriate framework for all circumstances, or even that it is the dominant approach. Further, there is no quintessentially “Australian” way to do audience studies research and, as will become clear, many Australian researchers are indebted to the foundational work of British and US audience studies researchers.

Commercial audience research with a focus upon ratings, focus groups, surveys, and “people meters” generates data of critical importance to advertisers and mass media organizations. In contrast, audience studies ethnographies are more likely to be relevant to policymakers and to academic scholarship – particularly to researchers, faculty, and students of media, communications, and cultural studies. However, no perspective arises fully formed. This chapter traces the history of the ethnographic audience studies approach, which was championed by the UK's Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies through the work of David Morley, and examines its influence upon audience studies research in Australia. The chapter relies on the work of Daniel Miller to illuminate aspects of the discussion and to underline how people's consumption patterns can build a sense of connection to others. Analogously with Miller's approach, this study is allied with work that analyzes and emphasizes the social construction of the meanings and uses of technology.

The chapter offers an overview of three major strands in audience research. It charts the shift from research on audiences' media preferences and on the programs they watch to newer work, which investigates more deeply audiences'/users' contextualized consumption of communication technologies in the home; then it moves into a detailed discussion of the Australian approach to conducting and writing up ethnographic audience research. In contemporary work, audience members become the focal points of their own stories in terms of what they do, and why, when they choose to consume media, and in terms of how they use communication technologies in domestic spaces. The conclusion ties the chapter together, it underlines the ways in which this approach to audience studies makes visible audiences' priorities and negotiations, and it outlines the importance of showcasing people's everyday media and communication choices for empirical work on audiences.

Illuminating the theory and practice of researching audiences, this chapter draws specifically upon two audience ethnography projects. Most of the examples cited here are drawn from a comparatively large study, of 26 families with school-aged children (Green & Holloway, 2004), which was funded by the Australian Research Council (2002–2005) and examined the place of the Internet in Australian family life. The smaller study constituted Donell Holloway's research for the Masters degree (Holloway, 2003), which examines the spatial geography and the increasing number of media screens in Australian domestic spaces. Quotes from this second study will be indicated by the siglum “[Holloway, MA].” This is not to imply that the two projects chosen here represent the only, or the best, audience studies research coming out of Australia. Indeed the past generation of researchers in this field includes much exemplary work – for instance Palmer (1986b; now Gillard), Hodge and Tripp (1986), Ang (1991), Moyal (1995), Nightingale (1996), Lally (2002), Balnaves, O'Regan, and Sternberg (2002), and McKee, Albury, and Lumby (2008). The research presented here is one manifestation of the Australian approach to audience studies research.

Influences on Audience Ethnography in Australia

He [Matthew, 14-year-old son] prefers to use the lounge room because it is the bigger TV. It's also got the heater in it. At this time of the year it is the warmer room. It's also more comfortable [...] But also the other thing I think is because I'm usually in the kitchen and that's closest to, perhaps, where I am. It's also closest to where his food and drink is. But I like to think that perhaps it's also closer to [any] interaction with me. (Mum, Lisa)

(Holloway & Green, 2008, pp. 50–51 [=Holloway, MA])

David Morley, Audience Studies and the Domestication of Technology

David Morley pioneered an approach to audience studies that put it in direct opposition to the kinds of ratings surveys that had previously been termed “audience research.” Whereas most ratings were about quantifying and managing the audience (Ang, 1991), Morley's approach to studying audiences centered upon understanding the meanings that audience members made from their engagement with media products. This new, qualitative approach was initiated in the late 1970s, by Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley (among others), with a research project focusing on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)'s evening magazine current affairs program Nationwide (Brunsdon & Morley, 1978; Morley, 1980). The Nationwide study was originally set up to interrogate Stuart Hall's (1973) influential encoding/decoding model of communication, which argued against the classic sender–message–receiver framework (Shannon, 1948a, 1948b; Weaver & Shannon, 1963).

The classic communication model saw any problems with the effective communication of meaning as resulting from “noise” or “interference.” Hall's approach was to critique all three elements of the Weaver and Shannon model. He argued that the sender does not have the power to determine the reception of the message; the message can never be transparent as to meaning; and the receiver (audience) has the power to read the message in a variety of ways (Proctor, 2004). According to Hall, any message sent would prompt one out of three possible readings in the receiver. The “dominant” reading was the communication intended by the message sender; a “negotiated reading” was one where some elements of the dominant reading were accepted and some rejected; and an “oppositional” reading occurred when an audience member rejected a reading in its entirety. Testing this out, Morley had unionists (oppositional) and managers (dominant) watch Nationwide content in two separate groups and recorded their very different reactions to the program. As a result of the Nationwide study, Morley argued that the meanings people make of media reflect their social and cultural backgrounds: ultimately, audiences invest media with meanings. This approach to audience research positioned audience members as powerful and as able to offer an affirmative response to media, which honored their specific view of the world.

Morley went on to develop a more naturalistic approach to audience research. One of the critiques of the Nationwide study was that a group of people rarely found themselves sitting down together for the express purpose of watching a television program and commenting upon it. Instead, the practice of media consumption was integrated into everyday life and was generally a domestic activity. Responding to these comments, Morley's next big project was Family Television (1986), a study of the consumption of television within the family home. Just as the Nationwide research was about the viewing position of the audience rather than about the content of the program, Family Television was about a lot more than the simple act of watching TV. In Morley's opinion, “the social dimensions of ‘watching television’ – the social relationships within which viewing is performed as an activity – have to be brought more directly into focus if we are properly to understand television audiences' choices of, and responses to, their viewing” (Morley, 1986, p. 15). Inevitably, given that Family Television was based upon interviews with couples, the book addressed gender, power, and domesticity as well as audience responses to program content.

Morley used his interviews with 18 families to illustrate the dynamics of television consumption in everyday life. As he was to put the situation subsequently, in Daniel Miller's (1995) reader on consumption studies, “Once one takes seriously the fact that television is a domestic medium (and is characterized by program forms specifically designed for that purpose), it becomes clear that the domestic context of television viewing is not some secondary factor, which can subsequently be sketched in” (Morley, 1995, p. 316). Rather, argues Morley, “the domestic context of TV viewing, it becomes clear, is constitutive of its meaning” (p. 321).

By the early 1990s the theoretical frameworks developing around audience studies had expanded to examine the ways in which households “domesticated” technology. The “domestication of technology” conceptual framework was spelled out in a seminal chapter by Roger Silverstone, in collaboration with Eric Hirsch and David Morley (1992). The three constructed the household as an entity with permeable boundaries and saw technology as being drawn into the household to meet particular social and cultural needs. The dynamic of “appropriation” marked the stage at which a technology was desired, sourced, and procured for the household, while that of “objectification” addressed the placement of the technology and the relative access enjoyed by different family members. “Incorporation” described the way in which the technology was integrated within the rhythms and practices of daily life. Finally, “conversion” assessed the means through which the products of technology and the information, knowledge, opinion, and understandings forged through its consumption could be harnessed to the broader ambition of identity formation and the creation of cultural capital.

In a refinement of the original model, Silverstone and Haddon (1996) proposed that the creative processes of “incorporation” and “conversion” should be considered in terms of everyday innovation and everyday innovators. They argued that consumers of technology find novel and unanticipated ways of responding to the opportunities afforded to them (e.g., Marvin, 1988), and that this becomes evident when we examine the ways in which people construct their relationships with technology. Such a perspective ties in with the notion that individuals, even within the same household, inhabit dynamic communication ecologies that are particularly tailored for them (Carey, 1993; Sless, 1995). These ecologies are constructed imaginatively, according to the materials available, the needs of the individual, and the preferences of the people that an individual communicates with. Over the past 50 years television has provided much of the cultural raw material that audience members use as conversation topics and through which they construct their sense of a wider social project. Since the turn of the century, however, people in Western democracies have increasingly turned to the Internet as well for the provision of a context for their place in the world.

Within audience studies, when researchers analyze people's use of communication technologies, they also comment on how audiences use the products of mass, niche, and user-generated media. Audience members fashion semiotic material from the media in ways that express their personal values and pleasures, allowing people to connect with each other. This “conversion” phase marks the climax of the functional value of popular culture as embodying “social pleasures and meanings” (Turner, 1996, p. 42). Thus the domestication of technology framework is also implicated in the theory of consumption, since a major role of information and communication technology, in terms of audience studies, is to provide access to programs and material that individuals can consume and convert into social currency.

Daniel Miller and the Theory of Consumption

They're almost expected [by the schools] to have computer skills and if they don't have the exposure to the variety of programs that are available then they don't learn those skills and the research that goes with it [...] What's the awful phrase? Knowledge is power. (Interviewee)

(Green, Holloway, & Quin, 2004, p. 90)

As the consumption of media tells us about audiences, so the social biography of an object illuminates the lives of the people who use it (Kopytoff, 1986). Studying the ways in which people consume goods, services, and content offers a holistic view of people's engagement with media and technology and indicates how patterns of consumption connect audience members with others. US academic Igor Kopytoff highlighted the cultural dimension of consumption by arguing that “things” had a social biography as a result of their contribution to the social lives of their users. He demonstrated that consumption is a process particularly revealing of social and cultural value. His famous biography of a car in Africa “revealed an entirely different biography [or history] from that of a middle-class American, or Navajo, or French peasant car” (p. 67).

Daniel Miller's work Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987) ties the consuming subject to the contexts of household and mass production – including the production of mass media. His theory was tested in fieldwork in Trinidad that examined Trinidadian audiences' consumption and conversion of The Young and the Restless. At first glance this television series might seem to be an unlikely point of focus for Miller's work on consumption in a struggling postcolonial nation like Trinidad. The program deals with the improbable lives and loves of an ill-assorted collection of mainly white American characters, predominantly young and/or socially and sexually restless. Yet Miller could not ignore the great importance that his interviewees placed on being able to watch each episode of this soap opera:

Miller tried to rationalize the importance of the program for its Trinidadian audience and argued that it reinforces the “bacchanal as the lesson of recession [...] [a lesson] which insists that the domestic and the façade of stability is a flimsy construction that will be blown over in the first storm created by true nature” (p. 179). The idea here is that the seeking of pleasure and enjoyment are appropriate responses to deprivation, and that what may appear regulated and ordered on the surface is in truth only a veneer. Miller goes on to suggest that the program “colludes with the local sense of truth as exposure and scandal” and that audience members use the program as a way to discover and discuss the vagaries of appearance and reality, hope and fear, which make sense to them as a narrative for their daily lives. In this way The Young and the Restless “is not just Trinidadian but [...] “True True Trini'” (ibid.) and is identified by Trinidadians as communicating fundamental realities germane to their lived experience.

While the mass audience may be conceived of in terms of its international dimensions, audience studies research is concerned with uncovering the local construction of global culture (Morley, 1991). Given that elements of popular culture are valued and traded in debate and discussion, it is gossip, the exploratory and the new that has greatest conversion value and is the easiest to trade socially. Dynamic by nature, popular culture is continuously reinventing itself in local cultural exchange. Meanings are constructed collaboratively, at the level of the household and the individual conversation, through the circulation and exchange of ideas, memories, and opinions prompted by media products. Audiences are active in their use of media materials both as a means of communication with others and as a way in which to make sense of their world.

The Social Construction of Technology

It's great for this spontaneous kind of thing [...] I do communicate with France, with my friends [there]. Not extensively, but here and there I send an email. I go online and then I usually send everyone an email quickly when I've got a couple of hours. (Nadia)

(Holloway & Green, 2003, p. 11)

Both the domestication of technology and the theory of consumption sit within the overarching conceptual framework of social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Social constructionism is a branch of epistemology (the study of knowledge, one of the traditional branches or “parts” of philosophy); hence it is concerned with the philosophical understanding of what people know and how they know it. Within the general debate about knowledge, social constructionism is sometimes positioned as the opposite of essentialism (Oderberg, 2007), which is built around the contrary idea that things have an inherent or essential meaning that underpins, but is entirely separate from, the ways in which they are socially constructed.

Social constructionism refers to the shared effort of a group, community, or entire society to construct meanings around an object or thing. For example, a number of human societies construct the “pig” as “unclean” or “polluting”; in contrast, others construct it as ham, pork, or bacon. Communities and associations of animal rights activists might construct the “pig” as an intelligent animal, generally held in circumstances of unimaginable deprivation and tortured in order to provide humans with food that is often too rich in calories for their own good. In all these ways, argue social constructionists, the project of the construction of meaning is a social one, in which people deepen their understandings through shared discussion and through shared actions that put those understandings into practice. Discourse and narrative analysis become, accordingly, useful tools for understanding these socially produced “writings.” Key theorists in this field include Game (1991), Searle (1995), Hacking (1999), and Burr (2003).

The social construction of technology (SCOT) is generally associated with the work of Pinch and Bijker (1984), which was further developed by Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch (1987). It offers both a theory and a methodological approach that sets out a series of steps to follow when analyzing the uses of a technology. Within the SCOT framework, particular emphasis is placed upon “relevant social groups,” principally the producers and the users of a technology. Such “relevant social groups” can also include regulators and journalists, for instance. While one criticism of the SCOT approach is that there are no objective tests as to what constitutes a relevant social group, within the context of social constructionism the identification of any relevant social group is itself the outcome of social constructionist processes.

As social constructionism can be contrasted with essentialism, so the social construction of technology can be contrasted with technological determinism. Technological determinism argues that the “nature” of the technology determines its effects. One example of the technological determinist perspective is Theodore Roszak's polemic against the computer:

A social construction of technology approach argues that the social potential of a technology changes over time, according to its use. The fact that the Internet was originally the creation of the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency does not mean that it is only ever, and can only ever be, a technology of war (Green, 2010).

Australian Audience Studies

Writing [emails] on the internet has that sort of anonymity that talking on the phone doesn't, like writing letters to and fro to people, but it's also immediate so you [have to] be careful what you say because you can say the wrong thing and then “Bam!” (Donna, discussing communication with her ex-husband during the breakdown of her marriage)

(Holloway & Green, 2003, p. 10)

When many Australian researchers argue for an “ethnographic” approach to audience studies (Gray, 2003), they are constructing a specific notion of ethnography, which suits their own purposes. It is ethnography that placed David Morley in the living-rooms of families and couples, to view along with them their shared and separate television programs. This approach to ethnography eschews the idea that it is still appropriate to gather together a group of people who would never usually watch television in each other's company – and to do it with the aim of sitting them down, screening a television program, and getting them to discuss it. For many Australian scholars, an ethnographic audience study aligns itself with Family Television and away from The Nationwide Audience, but it still accepts the insights provided by both research projects. It understands that the audience is powerful in its capacity to make and communicate meanings, and it assumes that this meaning-making power is most accessible to researchers in domestic spaces.

As in most Western democracies, there are three key components of Australian audience research: (1) research that informs policy and regulatory debates, which is often government sponsored; (2) research that has a marketing and sales focus; and (3) “academic” research, which investigates the importance of the media in people's lives and places media consumption within theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Each of these three areas will be briefly addressed, the greatest attention being paid to academic research and to key Australian scholars who have influenced the field. Audience research is often combined with content and textual analysis, so there is some specificity about the media programs to which the audience is responding.

Regulators and policymakers are interested in audience research because they believe that media has effects on audiences, even if it is unclear what effects occur in whose case, how, and when. This “media effects” hypothesis justifies some regulation of the media, for example the classification of movies and computer games that restricts them to audiences of the appropriate age. In post-World War II Australia the key authorities concerned with regulating broadcasting have changed over time, in response to developments in media, policy, and legislation. These successor institutions are the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (1949–1976); the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (1976–1992); the Australian Broadcasting Authority (1992–2005); and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA; 2005–2011). The Australian Communications and Media Authority (2007) carried out a major study titled Media and Communications in Australian Families, while the Australian Bureau of Statistics also investigates such issues as Australian households' use of information technology and Australian Internet activity and access (2010a, 2010b).

Ratings research began as a means through which marketers and consumer behaviorists investigated and managed audiences, but academics soon began to use it to theorize the disciplining of audience members for commercial purposes. Critical theorists ultimately constructed the mass media as a way of delivering audiences to advertisers (Smythe, 1981). Australia's particular contribution to the field of ratings research lies in Ien Ang's (1991) seminal work on Desperately Seeking the Audience, Balnaves and colleagues' (2002) edited collection on Mobilising the Audience, and Balnaves, O'Regan, and Goldsmith's (2011) Rating the Audience: The Business of Media.

Whereas the ethos of the regulatory approach is based on a view that it is comparatively unproblematic to decide what is good and what is bad for would-be audiences, commercial audience research seeks to understand the media preferences of target publics, so that they can better deliver carefully tailored messages. The effort that goes into policymaking and commercial research indicates that audiences are problematic and can be unpredictable. Ideas about the active audience naturally follow on from the realization that different people form different understandings of the same media products, which means that they engage actively with what they consume. Over the past 25 years Australian academic audience researchers have tended to take an “active audience” approach to their work, which started with a burgeoning of research and publication in the mid-1980s.

The year 1986 was a good one for the new field of audience studies research in Australia. Bob Hodge and David Tripp (1986) published their book Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach, while Patricia Palmer (now Patricia Gillard) paid particular attention to girls' reception of television (1986a) and to the role of television as a source of material for children's play (1986b). In the same year an influential paper by Virginia Nightingale asked: “What's happening to audience research”? It was a precursor to her monograph on audiences (Nightingale, 1996).

Ann Moyal studied a different kind of “audience.” In 1988 she investigated Australian women's uses of the telephone, conducting in-depth interviews with 200 women aged from 15 to over 75 and analyzing the participants' diaries in which they recorded their daily phone use. Using these data, Moyal suggested a distinction between “intrinsic” and “instrumental” uses of the phone where the latter involved information-seeking and the conduct of business (Moyal, 1995). Except for women who worked from their homes (who made 10–12 instrumental calls per week), Moyal's respondents averaged 2–6 instrumental calls over a 7-day period. This comparatively low level of instrumental activity contrasted with the high level of intrinsic calls: 20–28 per week, averaging about 15–20 minutes in length, but sometimes lasting up to an hour (ibid.).

The major purpose served by Moyal's respondents' intrinsic calls was “kinkeeping” (p. 289). This was Moyal's term for her respondents' use of prolonged and frequent communication to maintain and strengthen links with family and friends (“kith and kin”). Kinkeeping meant that people who were emotionally connected with one another also remained closely aware of what was going on in each other's lives. Citing Lana Rakow's (1988) US studies, Moyal identified a major gender aspect to this emotional work, wherein kinkeeping was particularly recognized as “women's business,” or “gendered work” and “gender work” (Moyal, 1995, p. 304).

The first Australian audience studies about computer usage began in the 1990s. They included Elaine Lally's ethnographic study of computers in Australian homes, the arrival of the “personal computer” years before the domestic introduction of the Internet. Although Lally's work was from the mid-1990s, it was published internationally in 2002 and included photographs of the family computer's location in the domestic environment, helping the reader understand its place in the spatial and temporal fabric of the respondents' homes. Robyn Quin and Jack Seddon followed Lally's lead, but they specifically studied families with school-aged children and they investigated their use of the Internet. The fieldwork was carried out in 2002–2004, on the cusp of the transition from dial-up connections to the always-on broadband – and, ultimately, wireless – services. Some aspects of the research are included in Green (2010).

A recent Australian ethnography with a difference, by Alan McKee, Kath Albury, and Catharine Lumby (McKee et al., 2008), researched 1,000 members of the Australian audience for pornography, alongside contributions from producers and distributors of pornographic digital versatile discs (DVDs). A number of respondents contributed further to the research through in-depth interviews, and the results were published in The Porn Report. The authors argue that there is little evidence that pornography has negative effects among adult users, and they suggest that research that indicates otherwise has generally involved exposing non-pornography users to pornographic materials in laboratories: an unrepresentatively artificial environment. Additionally, the study indicates that most respondents believe their use of pornography offers positive benefits.

The Ethnographic Audience Research Approach

This chapter now considers ways in which ethnographic audience research may be approached and conducted. In general, an ethnographer, in embracing the ethnographic method, is making his or her presence explicit in the research. Skeggs, discussing feminist ethnography, comments that it is

Ethnographic audience research ticks most of these boxes, although an ethnographer in the anthropological tradition would quibble about the notion of “a prolonged period of time.” The period of time is prolonged in relation to that required by a survey or a focus group alone. In contrast to the survey, an ethnographic investigation involves multiple points of contact with the research unit. This unit can be the household, the parental couple (as in Morley's case), or the individual within the household. The research approach discussed below stems from the authors' Australian Research Council-funded “Internet in Australian family life” (IAFL) project. Eligible families had at least one child still at school and family members were interviewed separately, usually on two separate occasions.

The Semi-Structured Interview

A semi-structured interview approach utilizes a “guide” to the important topics to be covered in every interview, but it accepts that not all interviewees will wish to respond to all the aspects of the research in equal measure. Instead, the ethnographic interviewer learns more about his/her respondents' views by allowing individual interviewees to set their own agenda within the research framework. This approach also allows for a more authentic communication and a more responsive exchange, and it genuinely values the interviewee's input more than would be the case if the researcher determinedly inflicted the same questions upon all the respondents in the same way, using the same words and the same order in asking. Ethnographic audience researcher Shaun Moores describes his interview technique:

Open-endedness implies lack of closure. As well as asking open questions, openness can be introduced through the use of multiple prompts: “Anything else?” Such flexibility and prompting limits the number of interviews that can be conducted in a day: it is unwise to schedule more than three, and they should be at least three hours apart. This gap allows for a break for the interviewer and ensures that he/she has time to travel to the next (interviewee-determined) location even if the first interview has lasted for up to two hours. In an ideal situation, researchers should offer the interviewee as much time as he/she wish to take. While the “average interview” length is typically one hour, the interview itself is usually preceded and followed by hospitable social exchange and by unrecorded general discussion, which can later be captured in the researcher's field notes.

Interview as Social Event

The interview is itself a social event, and the researcher is embedded in it. The researcher is required to open communication, to establish trust, to offer an invitation and have it accepted, to travel to a convenient place of the interviewee's choosing (usually at the interviewees' home), to be welcomed there and offered refreshments. Once settled, the researcher and the interviewee participate in a face-to-face exchange that restates the reasons behind the research and the expectations of both parties. The researcher takes field notes of what is said and of what is seen. When the research involves technological equipment, such as a computer and access to the Internet, issues of objectification and incorporation remain important. Usually before the interview, sometimes after, the researcher asks about the placement of computers in the home. Typically, the researcher might ask to see the computers and the modem. He/she might check the access through broadband or dial-up. Is there more than one computer, and, if so, how many are connected to the Internet? Is the connection wireless, or does it use cable? Why are the computers placed in the positions in which they are found? At some point the researcher might ask and receive permission to take photographs of the computer work stations (Holloway, 2003; Lally, 2002); and in mid-discussion he/she might ask permission to turn on the recording, just so that he/she don't miss anything.

This ethnographic approach locates the interview within the context of a social information-giving exchange. It encourages the interviewee to talk about what they know: their family's approach to the Internet and the technology and telecommunications services required for accessing it. The ethnographic method values the everyday patterns and rhythms of family life and is passionately interested in the ways in which the family negotiates rights and opportunities for access. These are all areas upon which the interviewee is an expert and, as that expertise is recognized, the relationship develops and the interviewee warms to his/her topic.

Multiple Voices and Data Triangulation

The ethnographic interview has a rhythm: it typically ranges from half an hour to two hours in length. These parameters tend to reflect age and gender, as well as the sense of connection established between interviewer and interviewee. Domestic social life usually allows for one or two interviews in a single sitting; but, almost invariably with a household of three or more people, the researcher has to arrange a second visit to complete his/her work with the family. This is not a problem: it offers further validity to the approach. It offers the researcher an opportunity to check on different perspectives with different family members. Interviewing the parents and their child separately offers an element of “triangulation” and a range of viewpoints upon a topic:

Triangulation is a term borrowed from map-reading and surveying, which addresses a process through which a range of separate points can be used to identify and cross-check one unique location. This allows the person taking the readings to feel confident that they are indeed where they think they are. In ethnographic audience studies this triangulation dynamic is harnessed when field notes, interviewee comments, observations, and repeated visits all point to the same outcome. Thus Gavin and Xavier's exchange indicates that there is a discussion in the home about whether the teenager spends “too much” time on the Internet and what other activities might be consequently displaced. Triangulation allows the researcher access to information about complex beliefs and behaviors, and to multiple points of view.

Repeated visits also allow researchers to monitor change. Even the time between separate visits can be illustrative. For example, in Donell Holloway's Masters research, it became evident that a six-month gap was sufficient to identify a process of “cascade adoption.” When revisiting two of the families within her six-family study she found that they had each recently purchased new or add-on technologies. Even though research participants had not anticipated the purchase of these technologies at the time of the initial interviews, within six months they had often “upgraded” their equipment or services by moving from dial-up to broadband or from one point of connection to wireless, or by buying a laptop as well as a desktop. One family had purchased a new, more powerful computer for the household, while another had acquired broadband access. The reasons for getting upgraded technologies are not always simple or unidimensional. Single mother of three Theresa (below) explained that a combination of pester power, changed work conditions involving less information technology (IT) support, and the prospect of improved connectivity influenced her decision to subscribe to broadband. She outlined her reasons in an email to Holloway:

Sometimes this cascade adoption occurred even though such a move had been explicitly ruled out in the earlier interviews.

Interviewing Children

On occasion, research participants are too young to be formally interviewed, yet their insights are still extremely important. This is especially the case if researchers wish to understand the means through which children enter Internet culture and become “enculturated” to the online environment. In her fieldwork Holloway, who is an experienced primary school teacher, encouraged her younger interviewees (aged approximately 5–10) to draw pictures of their ideal rooms, including where they would put a computer. These images provided access to a range of material that could then form the basis for a discussion with the child. This technique has also been used by Livingstone and Bober (2003).

One such image from Holloway's work is included here, and represents Rhianna's fantasy bedroom. Rhianna was aged 10 at the time of her interview, and her drawing reflects the desire of many children to use their bedroom as a “private place for socializing, identity display and just being alone” (Livingstone & Bober, 1998, p. 24). Rhianna's fantasy disco space (below) also seems to distinguish this as a pre-teen girl's fantasy bedroom. Pre-teen girls tend to use their bedrooms as “private place[s] for the enjoyment of personal music” (Marshall, 1997, p. 74).

Rhianna's fantasy bedroom, with its media technologies as well as a funky hand chair and disco room, influenced (as she explained) by the retro filmAustin Powers, acts as a reminder that contemporary children's culture often seems quite indistinguishable from consumer culture. Children's involvement in a consumer culture, which is distinctly different from adults', is a relatively new Western phenomenon. It reflects a shift in the status of children and childhood, from a time at the start of the twentieth century, when large families were an economic asset, to much smaller numbers of “high-investment” children, one hundred years later. As children became liberated from the labor market and put into schools; as economic development and improvements in the standard of living provided increased “domestic well being; more clean clothes; more varied diet; cleaner, larger living spaces; more heating” (Seiter, 1998, p. 302); and as women's participation in the workforce increased, so, Seiter argues, a children's consumer culture steadily emerged.

Figure 16.1 Rhianna's fantasy bedroom.

This children's culture was an important part of Holloway's research into the increasing numbers of screens in people's homes and into family members' uses of the Internet in daily life. As well as asking children to talk to her as they drew their ideal rooms, Holloway would sit with the children and get them to show her how they used the computer. This included noting whether the child could turn the computer on him-/herself, seeing his/her folders, files, and favorite Internet sites, and finding out whether he/she used instant messaging software to talk to friends online. While older interviewees less commonly required such concrete ways for their knowledge to be accessed as part of the interview process, these strategies were useful with quiet teenagers, who were willing to contribute but who found “discussion” too taxing or difficult.

The use of these different ways of accessing information about individuals' and households' Internet culture involves some risk. The more data are collected, the greater the likelihood is that researchers will drown in details and find it impossible to process the material to their satisfaction. In ethnographic work it is important to maintain a sense of both the wood and the trees, as well as to have an understanding of what is already known in the field and of what is new, or specific to the project at hand. It may be impossible to do justice to all the data collected, but it is important to aim for a holistic overview as a means of identifying and disseminating critical elements of the findings. It is to the techniques of processing and analysis that this chapter now turns.

Processing and Analyzing Data

It [a teenage son's use of pornography] doesn't bother me at all. If he wants to do that then he can do it because he'll get sick of it and I think initially it was “let's see what we can do.” I remember once, he called me in and says “Mum, come and look at her boobs” and I looked at it and I said “it's disgusting” or something and walked away and he laughed his head off. But I've never come in and found him looking at that stuff. I remember once, but I was home when he was looking at it. It's just not – [it's] something that I'm not really worried about. It's up to him.

(Green et al., 2004, p. 92)

The primary data in ethnographic research tend to consist of full transcript records of tape-recorded in-depth interviews; field notes and other researcher-noted observations; and specially created ancillary documents such as interviewees' drawings and photographs. Typically these elements will constitute a full text database that can be analyzed through the use of qualitative interpretative software such as NVivo. This analytical process is designed to facilitate an uncovering of the unconscious meanings and organizing principles used by interviewees to construct their view of the world. Making visible these underpinning elements of belief has some parallels with a “grounded theory” approach to analyzing data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987; Strauss & Corbin, 1990), although the authentic use of grounded theory is to create new or revised theoretical propositions, which are grounded in qualitative data that can be further explored by other research.

While data analysis of large sets of verbatim materials can be thorough and complete and can seem to be objective through the use of appropriate software, there is always a subjective element determined by the researcher. This subjectivity is implicit in the decisions about who is interviewed, in the questions asked, in the size of the interview sample, in the inclusion of other research materials, and in the identification and use of themes from within the data. Two categories of transcribed data tend to be selected for inclusion in the writing up phase. The first priority is to identify interviewees' “common” experiences: insights and comments that recur in different contexts, offered by different interviewees. The clearest or most evocative statement of that common experience is the best one to use. The second set of sought-after data is the exceptional remark: the outlier. Including minority perceptions uncovered in the research is one way of offering balance and of honoring the diversity of the research population. It is also a demonstration that the people chosen and the questions asked have avoided the construction of a false conformity. A divergence of views brings the research to life.

In acknowledging the subjective element necessarily introduced in human communication by the research process, good ethnographic research often provides the reader with information about the ethnographer and his/her relationship with the research participants and, where this exists, his/her connection with the funding body. Sometimes research remains good even when the researcher has been unable to afford the time or cost of full transcription and has instead worked from partial transcripts. Such an approach can be justified by assessing field notes and summary data of the total database, with a view to identifying relevant themes. Following this meta-analysis, the researcher can drill down through the data to access the interviewees' verbatim comments related to the themes identified. These interview snippets are subsequently transcribed. In this semi-transcribed approach subjectivity is foregrounded more than is the case with a full-text database, but all ethnographic audience studies research is subjective.

Good ethnographic research does not concentrate upon establishing in any detail consistency between researchers from different projects, or between a project's interviewees. Instead, the aim of ethnographic research is to achieve what Geertz (1973) calls a “thick description.” Talking about ethnographic anthropology, Geertz comments: “Rather than generalizing across cases, which is the normal scientific procedure, interpretive anthropology aims for ‘thick description’ by generalizing deeply within cases” (p. 26). In contrast with the primacy accorded by Geertz to thick description, Barrett (1997) takes the view that it is “the burst of insight” that characterizes “a well-developed sociological imagination and a flair for perceptiveness” (p. 249). He comments that,

All the direct quotations used in published research and final reports must come accurately from tapes that can be deciphered audibly and that are appropriately referenced and stored. Whether or not a full text database exists, the reader has a right to expect that verbatim quotes are verifiable. Even so, it is sometimes important that the respondent cannot be identified, and details of individual speakers are often partially fictionalized. Indicative biographical data are useful, however, and help the reader identify with the research and its findings. Naturally, only ancillary identifying information can be fictionalized – not verbatim quotes. Given this, it might sometimes be appropriate to fictionalize a place, if that place is not critical to the research or to the interview, and to fictionalize the names of people referred to by an interviewee. As a rule of thumb it is important to give an interviewee the possibility of hiding behind a “fact” in the research, if he/she is challenged by persons who think that they have recognized a speaker. In such cases an interviewee can make a statement like “Of course that's not me, the interviewee quoted in that research has three children and I have one: it's someone else.”

Ethnographic research offers a conversational input into research findings. This needs careful handling when one is writing up the research. It can be tempting to simply string together a patchwork of vivid quotes that, together, offer a “rich, deep” illustration of a theme. This is not good practice in Australian ethnographic audience studies research because it distracts from the goal of achieving rigorous analysis that underlies all good research outputs. Instead, quotations generally have to be introduced as an explicit illustration of a point being made, and also commented upon afterwards, in order to tie the verbatim quote clearly into the argument. In this way the research is not overwhelmed by the ethnography.

Conclusion

This chapter has described the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' approach to audience studies and has highlighted the importance of David Morley's work in establishing the active role that audience members play in constructing meaning from media texts. It has also provided an overview of audience studies research in Australia over the past quarter-century, and it has positioned the authors' work in this context, subtly indicating that the notion of an active audience is now interrogated in terms of the media technologies that the audience in question uses as much as of the media programs the audience consumes. Thus an ethnographic study of multiscreen use in the family home (Holloway, 2003; Holloway & Green, 2008) or of family Internet use (Green et al., 2004) is a research response to emerging technocultures, as well as to changing media content. Once audience members are studied for the technologies they use, it becomes possible to see the connections they construct and maintain with others through technology-based communication. This reshaping of the field, made for the purpose of investigating how and why audience members use technology to connect with others, is now as important to audience studies as the meanings that these members make from content (if not even more important), and it puts the audience members and their priorities firmly at the center of the research paradigm:

Ethnographic audience studies research requires an intensive commitment on the part of the researcher and an authentic engagement with the research participants. As a methodological approach, it has evolved over the decades and has been repurposed by media and communications scholars from the raw materials of methodologies used in slightly different contexts within sociology and anthropology. Ethnographic audience studies also privileges and celebrates the domestic and the everyday. It recognizes the value of understanding common experience, of exploring why people enjoy soap operas on television or reality TV. It avoids the value judgments of “high culture/low culture” debates and acts as a corrective to them. Given that one goal is to understand “social pleasures and meanings,” the usual site in which these are produced is the domestic arena. Here people are more able to do what they wish in the ways they wish to do it: free from the constraints of employers and paid work regimes. Insofar as gender and age constraints prevent interviewees from consuming media in the time and place desired, ethnographic audience studies research can illuminate the power dynamics within the home and interrogate the mechanisms by which these power dynamics change – for example, as children get older and demand greater autonomy and responsibility.

Ethnographic audience studies is not so much about media consumption as about investigating the ways in which people consume media while forming and expressing their individual identities. Audience members use the media to construct an understanding of the society in which they live, of the ways in which their lives intersect with that society, and of the means through which they are integrated within their social world. These understandings become accessible to the researcher from the rich data provided in in-depth interviews and from insights that illuminate the researcher's experiences, as well as the research participants' social practices and roles in different settings. While ethnographic audience research is subjective, it is also authentic. This research methodology offers many advantages as a way of explaining the importance of the media and of technologies of communication for the routines, rhythms, and events of everyday life.

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