ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how my research evolved out of an interrelated set of professional, personal and academic interests, accounts for the choice of ethnography as a methodological approach in the study of TV audiences, and highlights the key practical and theoretical importance of ‘TV talk’. It outlines the progression of the fieldwork in its main phases – groundwork, immersion, focusing – and addresses some of the problematic issues associated with researcherinformant relationships in ‘living fieldwork’ – disparities of power, the difficulty of disengagement, and questions of gender and ethnic difference. Finally I discuss problems associated with the act of ‘writing ethnography’: both the particular problems associated with writing, as I did, ‘in the field’, and more general problems of ‘ethnographic authority’ and responsibility.
