Document Type
Journal Article
Publisher
The University of Queensland
Faculty
Faculty of Community Services, Education and Social Sciences
School
School of Communications and Multimedia
RAS ID
1848
Abstract
This paper is a response to continued discussion about the necessary and sufficient characteristics of a claim to 'ethnographic method' when made by researchers in the Media and Cultural Studies traditions. Many of the seminal studies informing-particularly-audience studies research have claimed that they were 'ethnographic'. But is this a variety of ethnographic that an anthropologist would recognise? And if not, what kind of ethnography is it, and why might it be more or less appropriate as a research fromework than straightforward 'interview' or 'focus group' research? Further, when might we say that an interview is conducted in the course of an ethnographic study and when might we exclude a claim to ethnography? The discussion around these issues is fraught with a certain slipperiness in tenminology, and in the borrowing of research clothes from other traditions, but the Media and Cultural Studies canon is sufficiently robust to claim both difference from and similarity with versions of ethnography borrowed from a variety of research paradigms.
Access Rights
free_to_read
Comments
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of: Green, L. R. (2003). Attempting to ground ethnographic theory and practice. Australian Journal of Communication, 30(2), 133-145. Available here.