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Using Ethnography To Understand Everyday Media Practices In Australian

Family Life

Chapter · January 2013

DOI: 10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems097

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Title: Using ethnography to understand everyday media practices in Australian

family life

Authors: Donell Holloway and Lelia Green

Keywords:

Ethnography, television, internet, everyday media, family life, school-aged children, screen

culture, consumption, domestic communication technologies

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. As with 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 American 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 policy makers and academic scholarship, particularly for researchers, faculty and

students located in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies disciplines. However, no

perspective arises fully-formed. This chapter traces the influence of the ethnographic

audience studies approach, 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 work of Daniel Miller is used to illuminate

aspects of the discussion, and underlines how people’s consumption patterns can build a

sense of connection to others. Analogously, the chapter is allied with work that suggests the

meanings and uses of specific technologies are socially constructed.

The chapter then offers an overview of the three major strands of audience research.

It charts the shift from researching the media and programs that people watch to newer work

which investigates people’s consumption of media and communication technologies in the

home, before moving into an in-depth discussion of the Australian approach to the processes

involved in conducting and writing up ethnographic audience research. In contemporary

work, audience members become the centre of their own story in terms of what they do, and

why, when they choose to consume media and how they use communication technologies in

domestic spaces. The conclusion ties the chapter together and underlines the ways in which

this approach to audience studies makes visible the priorities, negotiations and the importance

of people’s everyday media and communication choices.

 Illuminating the theory and practice of researching audiences, this paper draws

specifically upon two experiences of audience study ethnography. Most examples derive

from a comparatively large study of 26 families with school-aged children (Green &

Holloway 2004), funded by the Australian Research Council (2002-5), which examined the

place of the internet in Australian family life. The smaller study constituted Donell

Holloway’s Masters research (2003), examining the spatial geography and increasing number

of media screens in Australian domestic spaces. Quotes from this second study will be

indicated by [MA]. This is not to imply that this is the only, or the best, audience studies

research coming out of Australia. Indeed, the past generation of Australian audience studies

researchers includes much exemplary work such as Palmer (1986: now Gillard), Hodge and

Tripp (1986), Ang (1991), Moyal (1995), Nightingale (1996), Lally (2002) Balnaves et al.

(2002) and McKee et al (2008). However, the research extracted 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, p.50-

51 [Holloway’s 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 which had previously been termed ‘audience

research’. Whereas most ratings were about quantifying and managing the audience (Ang

1991), Morley’s approach to studying audiences centred upon understanding the meanings

that audience members made from their engagement with media products. This new

qualitative approach was initially trialled in the late 1970s by Charlotte Brunsdon and Morley

with a research project focussing 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 influential

encoding/decoding model of communication (1973), 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 view 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 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) view 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 using the media they

consume reflect their social and cultural backgrounds: audiences make meanings. This

approach to audience research positioned audience members as powerful and able to structure

a response to media which honoured 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. In the same way the Nationwide research was more about the viewing position

of the audience than it was about the content of the program, Family Television was about

more than 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 eighteen families to illustrate the dynamics of

television consumption in everyday life. As Morley 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 characterised by programme 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” (1995, 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, working with Eric Hirsch and David Morley (1992). They 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 by 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 the technology; 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 in terms of 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 looking at 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 particular tailored and
dynamic communication ecologies (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 they communicate with. Over the past fifty years, television has

provided much of the cultural raw material which 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

to provide a context for their place in the world.

Within audience studies, when researchers analyse 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 enthusiasms, 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 which can be consumed by individuals and converted by them 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 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. American 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 (1986). 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” (Kopytoff, 1986. p.67).

Daniel Miller’s work Material culture and mass consumption (1987) ties the

consuming subject into the contexts of the household and mass production, including the

production of mass media. His theory was tested in fieldwork in Trinidad, examining the

Trinidadian consumption and conversion of The Young and the Restless. This program might

at first glance appear to be an unlikely focus for Miller’s work in a struggling post-colonial

nation like Trinidad. The television series deals with the improbable lives and loves of an

unlikely collection of mainly white American characters who are, 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 the soap opera:

Few televisions fail to attract a neighbour or two on a regular basis. Individuals

may shout deprecations or advice to the characters during the course of the
 programme. Afterwards there is often collective commentary and discussion.

There is a considerable concern to spread news of important events quickly. I was

slightly ‘shocked’ in my vicarious sense of propriety, when an important Muslim

festival I was watching was interrupted by three ladies who collectively

announced to the assembled group some new development which we had missed

by taking part in the ceremony (Miller 1992, p.168-9)

Miller tried to rationalise the importance of the program to its Trinidadian audience and

argued that it:

reinforces bacchanal as the lesson of recession which insists that the domestic and

the façade of stability is a flimsy construction which will be blown over in the

first storm created by true nature (1992, 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’” (Miller, 1992, p.179), 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 which 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 through

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 framework, and the theory of consumption, sit

within the overarching conceptual framework of social constructionism (Berger & Luckman

1966). Social constructionism is a branch of epistemology (Theory of Knowledge) and is

concerned with philosophical understandings about what people know and how they know it.

Within the general debate about knowledge, social constructionism is sometimes positioned

as opposite to essentialism (Oderberg 2007), which is 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 by a group, community or entire

society to construct meanings around an object or thing. For example, a number of human
societies construct ‘pig’ as ‘unclean’ or ‘polluting’; in contrast with those that construct it as

ham, or pork, or bacon. Communities and associations of animal rights activists might

construct ‘pig’ as an intelligent animal generally held and tortured in circumstances of

unimaginable deprivation to provide humans with food which is often too calorie rich for

their own good. In all these ways, argue social constructionists, the project of the construction

of meaning is a social one, where people deepen their understandings through shared

discussion and through shared actions which put those understandings into practice.

Discourse and narrative analysis accordingly become 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 Bjiker (1984) and further developed in Bjiker, Hughes and Pinch (1987). It

offers both a theory and a methodological approach which sets out a series of steps to follow

when analysing the uses of a technology. Within the SCOT framework, a particular emphasis

is placed upon ‘relevant social groups’, principally the producers and 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:

No matter how high the promise of that age [the information age] is pitched, the

price we pay for its benefits will never outweigh the costs. The violation of

privacy is the loss of freedom. The degradation of electoral politics is the loss of

democracy. The creation of the computerized war machine is a direct threat to the

survival of our species. It would be some comfort to conclude that these liabilities

result from the abuse of computer power. But these are the goals long since

selected by those who invented information technology, who have guided it and

financed it at every point along the way in its development. The computer is their

machine; its mystique is their validation (Roszak 1994, p.233).

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 to suit their own

purposes. It is an ethnography that placed David Morley in the front rooms of his family

couples viewing their shared and separate television programs. It 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 with the aim of sitting them down, screening a television

program, and getting them to discuss it. An ethnographic audience study aligns itself with

Family Television and away from The Nationwide Audience, but still accepts the insights

provided by both research projects. It understands that the audience is powerful in their

capacity to make and communicate meanings and assumes that this meaning-making power is

most accessible to researchers in domestic spaces.

As with most western democracies, there are three key aspects to Australian audience

research: (i) research that informs policy and regulatory debates, often government

sponsored; (ii) research that has a marketing and sales focus; and (iii) ‘academic’ research

that 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, with the greatest attention 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 policy makers are interested in audience research because they believe

media has effects on audiences; even if it is unclear which effects occur on whom, how and

when. This ‘media effects’ hypothesis justifies some regulation of the media, such as the

classification of movies and computer games, restricting them to appropriately aged

audiences. In post-WWII 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

(1949-76); the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (1976-92); the Australian Broadcasting

Authority (1992-2005); and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (2005-

2011). In 2007 the Australian Communications and Media Authority carried out a major

study into Media and communications in Australian families (ACMA 2007), while the

Australian Bureau of Statistics also investigates such issues as Australian households’ use of

information technology (ABS 2010a) and Australian internet activity and access (ABS

2010b).

Ratings research began as a means through which marketers and consumer

behaviourists investigated and managed audiences, but academics soon began to use it to

theorise 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 et al’s (2002)

edited collection on Mobilising the audience and Balnaves et al’s (2011) Rating the audience:

the business of media.

 Whereas the ethos of regulation 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 policy making, and

commercial research, indicates that audiences are problematic and can be unpredictable.

Ideas about the active audience naturally follow on from realising that different people form

different understandings of the same media products, meaning 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, starting with a burgeoning of

research and publication in the mid-1980s.

1986 was a good year for the new field of audience studies research in Australia. Bob

Hodge and David Tripp (1986) published their book on Children and television: a semiotic

approach, while Patricia Palmer (now Gillard) paid particular attention to girls’ reception of

television, and to its role as a source of material for children’s play in her two volumes, Girls

and television (Palmer 1986a) and The lively audience: a study of children around the TV set

(Palmer, 1986b). In the same year an influential paper by Virginia Nightingale (1986) asked:

‘What’s happening to audience research’? It was a precursor to her 1996 monograph:

Studying audiences: the shock of the real (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 analysing diaries of their phone use. Using this data, Moyal suggested a

distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ uses of the phone where instrumental uses

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 seven day period. This comparatively low

level of instrumental activity contrasted with 20-28 intrinsic calls per week, averaging about

15-20 minutes in length, but sometimes lasting up to an hour (Moyal 1995).

The major purpose served by Moyal’s respondents’ intrinsic calls was “kinkeeping”

(1995, 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 recognised 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, in 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. The

authors’ work, with Robyn Quin and Jack Seddon, followed Lally’s lead, but specifically

studied families with school-aged children and investigated their use of the internet. The field

work was carried out in 2002-4, 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, Catharine Lumby

and Kath Albury (2008), researched 1000 members of the Australian audience for

pornography, alongside contributions from producers and distributors of pornographic DVDs.

A number of respondents contributed further to the research through in-depth interviews and

the results were published in The Porn Report (2008). The authors argue that there is almost

no evidence of pornography having negative effects upon willing users in naturalistic settings

and 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 (2001), discussing

feminist ethnography, comments that it is:

A theory of the research process – an idea about how we should do research. It

usually combines certain features in specific ways: fieldwork that will be

conducted over a prolonged period of time; utilizing different research techniques;

conducted within the settings of the participants, with an understanding of how

the context informs the action; involving the researcher in participation and

observation; involving an account of the development of relationships between

 the researcher and the researched and focusing on how experience and practice

are part of wider processes (p. 426 italics in original).

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 with

Morley), 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 utilises a ‘guide’ to the important topics to be

covered in every interview, but accepts that not all interviewees will wish to respond to all

aspects of the research in equal measure. Instead, the ethnographic interviewer learns more

about their respondents’ views by allowing individual interviewees to set their own agenda

within the research framework. This approach also allows a more authentic communication,

and a more responsive exchange, and genuinely values the interviewee’s input more than

would be the case if the researcher determinedly inflicted the same questions, in the same

way, using the same words and in the same order, upon all respondents. Ethnographic

audience researcher Shaun Moores describes his interview technique:

 Interviews were relaxed in manner and conversational in tone – lasting up to two

hours – and whilst I kept a mental checklist of key topics to be covered,

informants were allowed the space to pursue issues which they perceived as

important or relevant. They were actively encouraged to speak from experience

and to relate episodes from their everyday lives. My style of questioning was

chiefly open-ended, designed to produce narrative responses rather than brief

answers (1996, p.34).

Open-endedness implies a 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 a

break for the interviewer and time to travel to the next (interviewee-determined) location;

even if the first interview has lasted for up to two hours. In the ideal situation, researchers

should offer the interviewee as much time as they wish to take. While the ‘average interview’

length is typically an hour, it is usually preceded and followed by hospitable social exchange

and 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 within 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 their

home), to be welcomed there and offered refreshments. Once settled, the researcher and the

interviewee participate in a face-to-face exchange which restates the reasons behind the
research and the expectations of both parties. The researcher takes field notes of what is said,

and what is seen. When the research involves a technology, such as a computer and access to

the internet, issues of objectification and incorporation remain important. Usually before the

interview, but 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. They might

check the access: broadband, dial-up. Is there more than one computer; if so, how many are

internet connected? Does the connection use wireless or cable? Why are the computers

placed in the positions in which they are found? At some point, they might ask and receive

permission to take photographs of the computer work stations (e.g. Lally, 2002; Holloway,

2003) and they might, mid-discussion, ask permission to turn on the recording, just so that

they 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 its access. 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 recognised, so the relationship develops and the interviewee warms to their

topic.

Multiple voices and data triangulation

The ethnographic interview has a rhythm which typically places it as extending 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 can usually embrace 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

their work with the family. This is not a problem: it offers further validity to the approach. It

allows an opportunity for the researcher to check different perspectives with different family

members. Interviewing the parent and their child separately offers an element of

‘triangulation’ and a range of viewpoints upon a topic (Green, Holloway & Quin, 2004):

Father of two, Xavier, expressed his concern about (what he perceived as) his

teenage son’s excessive use of the internet: ‘Well I think there’s far too much

time […] Gavin’ll spend a whole day on it. I try to get him to come to the footy

on Sunday. No. He’s available for friends [for online gaming and chat on the

internet]. He’ll spend all day on the computer’ (Xavier). Son Gavin (16), in a

separate interview, anticipated that this criticism had been made and felt

compelled to counter it: ‘Well he [dad] makes comments like saying I’m not fit

enough ‘cause I spent too much time on the computer but I play soccer a lot.

Like, I do sport perhaps everyday at school […] I mean, I think, such a piece of

crap (Gavin) (p.94).

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 in the place they think they are. In ethnographic audience studies, this triangulation

dynamic is harnessed when field notes, interviewee comments, observations and repeat visits

all point to the same outcome. Thus Gavin’s 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 behaviours, and multiple points

of view.

Repeat 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, 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 uni-dimensional. Single mother of three, Theresa (below) explained that

a combination of pester power, changed work conditions (with less IT support) and the

prospect of improved connectivity influenced her decision to subscribe to broadband. She

outlined her reasons in an email to Holloway:

We now access the Internet via broadband. I think this was from April

2003. There’s a number of reasons for this: It’s quicker, Nathan [15] was nagging

cause ADSL is a better connection than the dial up modem for his gaming (which

kept cutting out), and work advised staff that it was no longer supporting the

option of giving staff access to the Internet from home (as they could not

guarantee that this was complying with their AARNET responsibilities) via the
 dialup modem. And it is a much better service/access from/via the new ISP

(Theresa, 44) (Holloway, 2003, p.95).

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, school student, child interviewees (aged 5-

10, approximately) to draw pictures of their ideal rooms, including where they would put a

computer. These images provided access to a range of material which 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 socialising, identity

display and just being alone” (Livingstone, 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).

 Figure 1: Rhianna’s fantasy bedroom

Rhianna’s fantasy bedroom, with its media technologies as well as a funky hand chair

and disco room, influenced (as she explained) by retro film Austin 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 when large families were an economic asset at the start of the

twentieth century, to much smaller numbers of ‘high-investment’ children one hundred years

later. As children became liberated from the labour market and put into schools; as economic

development and improvements in the standard of living provided improved “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.

 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 child and get them to show her how they used the computer.

This included noting whether the child could turn the computer on themselves, their folders

and files, their favourite internet sites, and whether they used instant messaging software to

talk with their friends online. While older interviewees less commonly required such concrete

ways in which to access their knowledge as part of the interview process, such 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 collected, the greater the

likelihood that researchers will drown in the details, and find it impossible to process the

material to their satisfaction. In ethnographic work it is important to always maintain a sense

of both the woods and the trees, and to have an understanding of what is already known in the

field, and 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 analysing data

It [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, Holloway & Quin, 2004, p.92).

The primary data in ethnographic research tends 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 which can be analysed through

the use of qualitative interpretive software such as NVivo. This analytical process is designed

to facilitate an uncovering of the unconscious meanings and organising 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 (Glaser & Strauss

1967; Strauss 1987; Strauss & Corbin 1990) to analysing data; although the authentic use of

grounded theory is to create new or revised theoretical propositions grounded in qualitative

data which 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

as to who is interviewed, the questions asked, the size of the interview sample, the inclusion

of other research materials, and 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 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 honouring 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 within the research process, good ethnographic research often provides the

reader with information about the ethnographer and their relationship with the research

participants and, where this exists, their 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 is

justifiable 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 interviewees’ verbatim comments related to the themes identified.

These interview snippets are subsequently transcribed. In this semi-transcribed approach

subjectivity is fore-grounded 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 a detailed

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 ‘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” (1973, p.26). Contrasting

the primacy accorded by Geertz to thick description, Barrett’s (1997) view is that it is ‘the

burst of insight’ that characterises “a well-developed sociological imagination and a flair for

perceptiveness” (1997, p.249). He comments that

although long periods of fieldwork and hard work are prerequisites to sound

ethnography, these alone will not generate bursts of insight [which involve] deep

penetrations into the minute details of people’s everyday life, quick perceptions

that allow the fieldworker to understand their innermost motives (Barrett, 1997,

248).

All direct quotations used in published research and final reports must come

accurately from tapes which can be deciphered audibly and which 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

fictionalised. Indicative biographical data is useful, however, and helps the reader identify

with the research and it findings. Naturally, only ancillary identifying information can be

fictionalised: not verbatim quotes. Given this, it might sometimes be appropriate to

fictionalise a place, if that place is not critical to the research or the interview, and to

fictionalise 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

challenged by someone who thinks that they have recognised a speaker. In such cases an
interviewee can make a statement to the effect that ‘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 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 research practice in Australian ethnographic audience studies research, however, since

it distracts from the argument which 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 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’s

approach to audience studies, and highlighted the work of David Morley 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 positioned the authors’ work in this context, subtly indicating that the notion of the active

audience is now interrogated in terms of the media technologies they use as much as in the

media programs they consume. Thus an ethnographic study of multi-screen use in the family

home (eg Holloway 2003; Holloway & Green 2008), or of family internet use (eg Green,

Holloway and Quin 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 to investigate how and why
audience members use technology to connect with others is now as much, or more, important

to audience studies than the meanings they make from content, and puts the audience member

and their priorities firmly at the centre of the research paradigm:

When Lesley [respondent’s son] was looking at houses to buy in the east, I’d be

on the Internet having a look as well to see what was on sale. ‘Lesley, have you

looked at this one at such and such an agent?’. So I’m on the west coast and he’s

on the east coast, [I’m] house-hunting for him over there […] Now it’s a [my]

screensaver, his little house. It’s awesome, so that kind of thing’s really neat, to

be able to bring family that are far away closer (Donna) (Holloway & Green,

2003, p.8).

Ethnographic audience studies research requires an intensive commitment by the

researcher and an authentic engagement with the research participants. As a methodological

approach it has evolved over decades and 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 privileges and celebrates the domestic and the

everyday. It recognises the value in understanding common experience; in 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 these. 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 that they wish:

free from the constraints of employers and paid work regimes. Insofar as gender and age
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 change: for example, as children get older and demand more

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 identity. Audience members use media to construct an understanding of the society

in which they live, the ways within which their lives intersect with that society, and the

means though which they are integrated within their social world. These understandings are

accessible to the researcher in the rich data provided through in-depth interviews, and through

insights which illuminate the researcher’s experiences, as well as the research participants’.

Whilst 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, to everyday life.

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