Page 38 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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On the politics of empirical audience research

In his pioneering book, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, David Morley situates his research
on which the book reports as follows:

The relation of an audience to the ideological operations of television
remains in principle an empirical question: the challenge is the attempt to
develop appropriate methods of empirical investigation of that relation.
(Morley 1980a:162)

Although this sentence may initially be interpreted as a call for a methodological
discussion about empirical research techniques, its wider meaning should be sought in the
theoretical and political context of Morley’s work. To me, the importance of The
‘Nationwide’ Audience does not so much reside in the fact that it offers an empirically
validated, and thus ‘scientific’, account of ‘the ideological operations of television’, nor
merely in its demonstration of some of the ways in which the television audience is
‘active’. Other, more wide-ranging issues are at stake—issues related to the politics of
research.
Since its publication in 1980, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience has played an important role
in media studies. The book occupies a key strategic position in the study of media
audiences—a field of study that went through a rapid development in the 1980s. It seems
fair to say that this book forms a major moment in the growing popularity of an
‘ethnographic’ approach on media audiences—Morley himself has termed his project an
‘ethnography of reading’ (1981:13). This type of qualitative empirical research, usually
carried out in the form of in-depth interviews with a small number of people (and at times
supplemented with some form of participant observation), is now recognized by many as
one of the best ways to learn about the differentiated subtleties of people’s engagements
with television and other media.
This ‘ethnographic’ approach has gained popularity in both ‘critical’ media studies
and ‘mainstream’ mass communications research (see, e.g., Hobson 1980 and 1982; Lull
1980 and 1988; Radway 1984; Ang 1985; Jensen 1986; Lindlof 1987; Liebes and Katz
1990). A sort of methodological consensus has emerged, a common ground in which
scholars from divergent epistemological backgrounds can thrive. On the one hand,
qualitative methods of empirical research seem to be more acceptable than quantitative
ones because they offer the possibility to avoid what C.Wright Mills (1970) has termed
abstracted empiricism—a tendency often levelled at the latter by ‘critical’ scholars. On
the other hand, some ‘mainstream’ audience researchers are now acknowledging the
limitations on the kind of data that can be produced by large-scale, quantitative survey
work, and believe that ethnographically oriented methods can overcome the shortcomings
observed. Given this enthusiastic, rather new interest in qualitative research methods, I