ABSTRACT
Ethnographic research is an approach to audience studies that relies heavily on qualitative methodologies. Popular in the 1980s, the ethnographic approach placed a great deal of emphasis on the conditions under which audiences consumed media products. Television viewing by such groups as families became a particular target for ethnographic researchers. David Morley carried out a major ethnographic survey in 1978, in which he explored audience readings of the popular current affairs programme Nationwide. His research findings did not wholly fit with Hall’s categories in the Encoding and Decoding model, not least because many in the sample thought the programme irrelevant or that it made little sense to them. Despite the origins of this type of media research being over 30 years old, it remains useful for analysing how people engage with a variety of media – it is used, for example, in popular music research to explore music scenes and cultures. It is a research tool that is based on the direct observation of how people behave in certain social settings, whatever or wherever those might be. Given that much media content is now online, one of its offshoots useful for looking at such digital media is ‘netnography’, where researchers might analyse users’ internet use – perhaps to look at online communication (message boards) and for market research.
