Toward a Qualitative Methodology of Audience Study: Using Ethnography to Study the Popular Culture Audience

In critical communication circles, there has been much recent discussion of the issue of using qualitative methods for studying the popular culture audience. Communication researchers have become increasingly dissatisfied with a purely demographic approach to audience study and more interested in investigating the ways in which subjectivity is constructed at the site at which the audience constitutes itself - a realm somewhat resistant to quantitative methodology. Recent communication literature shows an almost complete lack of attention paid to the problem of the communication researcher's status as an insider to the culture he or she studies. People and their meaningful discourse are treated, in some respects at least, as objects, the objects of ethnographic record—;;objects with whom the ethnographer enters into discursive interaction, but objects, in some respects, nonetheless. In order to forge a workable, qualitative method for audience study, it will help to note the similarities between this kind of work and classical ethnography, as well as the differences between them.