Page 27 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

10 Introduction

identity by mapping out such temporal, spatial, and imagined terrains of
church, neighborhood, clan, nation, and world. Second, we can understand
how something as local and embodied as sensation—seeing, hearing, and
touching—mediates individuals and vast social forces and institutions
such as media producers, corporate advertisers, religious organizations,
governments, or entire nations, regarding the mediation as neither unilateral
nor arbitrary but as nuanced negotiations that must be studied up close,
though always with an eye to the macroecology that informs every media
commodity. Third, how media practices offer access to and draw from
collective imaginaries, the shared cultural resources of symbols, images,
sounds, songs, ideas, and personae whose knowledge and symbolic use invest
individuals in broad patterns of feeling that constitute their participation in
communities of different kinds.

Methodology, disciplinarity, research agenda

Though there is no reason to pit quantitative and qualitative research against
each other, as has sometimes happened in various “method wars,” much
of the work done by those who approach media from a cultural-studies
standpoint leans on qualitative analysis. This was thematized in the study of
communication in the late 1970s in an issue of Communication Research,
which carried a set of important essays that argued for the significance of
humanistic approaches to communication research, especially as regarded
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the study of popular culture. Qualitative research is designed to focus
attention on individuals and to capture what they say and do in terms of
narratives, which exert a compelling evidential effect as ways of explaining
what people think and feel. Meaning, the result of qualitative study, is not
understood as a rational choice or a consumer preference, which may be
very effectively measured by the apparatus of quantitative research as forms
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of information. Meaning is what people feel, intuit, imagine, fear, repress,
narrate, or symbolize. In an important essay on the study of reception, Klaus
Bruhn Jensen pointed out that quantitative study is well applied where
choices, behaviors, and concepts of value are routine, whereas “qualitative
inquiry is called for in the attempt to discern the categories audiences use
to decode specific media products” (Jensen 1987: 33). People can reply
to a questionnaire by stating their preferences, but how are we to learn
their criteria, their conceptualization or interpretive apparatus, and the
often unarticulated categories on which they rely unless we engage them in
interviews and observation? The cultural approach is one that is designed
to cater to meaning making as a lived process, especially one that must be
witnessed in situ. Yet the two methods of study should not be polarized.
In fact, some scholars effectively combine qualitative with quantitative