Page 305 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

294 Appendix: notes on method

household around meaning and identity needed to be kept at the forefront.
She was also an advocate for listening to the children in the households.
Particularly in the early stages of our work, we did extensive interviews
with younger children, and Lee was particularly accomplished at inter-
preting that material.
Anna Maria Russo took a particular interest in family systems as well,
and her own work on single-parent families problematized for me ques-
tions of how family dynamics might shift in relation to differing media
practices between households. Anna Maria also was very helpful in
analyzing material related to media events and to the 9/11-related material
that appears in Chapter 9, and helped us see that, while our interviewees
seemed not to be overly involved in post-9/11 ritual, they nonetheless were
profoundly – if subtly – affected and involved.
Christof Demont-Heinrich, Scott Webber, Michelle Miles, and Denice
Walker were not centrally involved in analysis of questions of religion per
se, though they did participate in many of the interviews reported here. To
my thinking, they contributed a good deal of skepticism about the
centrality of religion or spirituality in these interviews. Their healthy chal-
lenging of the notion that religion was explicitly present in the first
instance allowed us to rethink some unstated assumptions in our method
and approach. Later, we were able to rearticulate a sense of relations
between religion and media that accounted for what appeared on the
surface to be less evident as a result of those conversations.
Jin Kyu Park has been of inestimable help in the process of reconceptu-
alization and rethinking that has typified our methodological journey. Jin
is particularly good at identifying patterns and taxonomies of practice in
interview material. He brings an exceptionally sophisticated grasp of
cultural theory to these tasks, and his ability to make sense out of the
narratives in interview material is doubly impressive in that he is not
working in his native language. Jin was particularly helpful in the analysis
in Chapter 8. He joined Lynn, Diane, and Joe in helping me see that the
analysis in Chapters 6 and 7 represent, in addition to findings about the
way that media practice transcends those categories, an implicit critique of
the taxonomy itself. Jin struggled to fit various tentative taxonomies and
structures to the data, and, through his efforts, we came to the kind of
interpretive voice that would most helpfully express what we have seen
and found.
In addition to these major turns, our meetings have provided literally
scores of other insights, many of which we have attempted to record in
weekly minutes. As we said in Media, Home, and Family, no analysis
coming out of this project can be seen as entirely individual or novel. In
both theoretical and methodological terms, what I have been able to report
here is the result of a collaborative effort, and that is the key methodolog-
ical point I would emphasize here.