Page 303 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

292 Appendix: notes on method

We were gradually moving away from an implicit paradigm that
conceived of the project in rather traditional terms (looking for “effects”
of media on religion or vice versa) to an interpretive paradigm that
centered the meaning-making process in a form and context that was
available to us: the accounts and narratives of interviewees as they
reflected with us on their experience of media in daily life. This was articu-
lated more clearly as the study moved into a second phase, which placed a
particular focus on the digital media. In conjunction with these studies,
Lynn Clark has developed an extensive project looking at teens and youth
media practice in general, and a good deal of our interview attention also
moved in those directions.
The interviews reported here stretch across a number of the phases of
the overall project, which has developed a “sample” that now includes 144
families. The majority of interviews have taken place in the Denver
metropolitan area. No interviews have been conducted in the city of
Boulder (where our university is located) itself. In addition to these, a
number of interviews have been conducted in other regions of the US,
including in the upper midwest, the northeast, and in southern and
northern California. One group of interviews involves families that are
related to one another, allowing analysis of that type of social network.
In each of these household-level studies, we conduct in-depth, semi-
structured interviews with all household members as a group, and then
follow up with individual interviews with each of them. In keeping with
the protocols of our university’s human subjects panel, all individual inter-
views are conducted with an assurance of anonymity. Names reported in
this book and elsewhere are therefore not actual names, and other efforts
are made to shield identities. These household interviews are followed up,
when appropriate and promising, with additional interventions that might
include observations, focus group interviews, and other projective tech-
niques. Only interview material is reported in this volume.
As is detailed in Media, Home, and Family, an important feature of our
method has been the ongoing collaboration of the field research team in
regular weekly meetings where interview transcripts are discussed. In addi-
tion, these meetings function as an ongoing field research seminar, with
assigned readings from current theoretical and methodological literature.
These meetings then become the context within which we reflect together
on the nature of the research, develop ideas for ultimate publication, and
review and refine our methods and instrumentation on an ongoing basis.
It was from these meetings that a number of the most important ideas
emerged. I have attempted to credit some of the contributions of individual
members of our research team in the foregoing chapters of this book. I do
want to acknowledge here, though, some contributions to the analyses
reported here that were more general influences on my thinking. Lynn
Schofield Clark has played a major role in the form and shape of all phases