This video identifies the focus of qualitative research, and explains why gender studies exemplify the advantages of qualitative approaches. The video explores:
*Generalisability and qualitative methods.
*The importance of studying apparently trivial media examples.
*The role qualitative research plays in questioning common sense.
Audio TranscriptAuto-generated
in this unit, we're going to be learning about qualitative
media research, what it's for and how we can do
it and that's what we're going to be exploring in
the videos this week, I suppose broadly speaking, what I've
got here in the background is a picture of a
cinema audience from the 1930s and we see a collection
of young people who are looking with fascination, trepidation, engagement
at a screen.
And one of the things that media researchers quickly discovered
was that if you want to know about how media
are affecting society, one of the most effective ways of
figuring out how that works for real people in real
situations is to talk to them.
And one of the first things that media researchers began
to do was take groups of people like this and
just ask them how they felt about their media experiences,
what they meant to them, how it made them feel
why they valued them and so on and so forth.
And so what we're going to do in the in
the learning activities for this week is to think about,
well, what role does that kind of research play in
forming a wider understanding of media influence and how can
we begin to think about doing this kind of research.
And that's very much the theme of the reading for
this week on qualitative media research, which takes a particular
focus on thinking about the role that gender studies have
played in teaching us general principles about how to do
qualitative research and why we should want to do it
in the first place.
So let's start off just by thinking broadly about the
main point of the reading.
So one of the things that we know is that
the reading that I've asked you to do for this
week is about various ways of researching the production of
images of gender and the reception of images of gender.
And I've looked very specifically at the pornography industry.
But what I want you to do right now is
not think about pornography but think about the more general
issue of gender representation.
Because that's the point that I'm trying to make in
that right in that published work.
So what are the general points that I want you
to be taking away from the reading from this week
where we are listed here.
So what we're talking about is the way that gender
studies exemplify qualitative media research.
We can learn general points about why and how to
do qualitative research by looking very specifically at studies of
gender. And the main points that I want you to
think about are as follows.
First, qualitative media studies relate specific examples of media culture
and action to general principles of media influence.
And this is articulated in rows gilles notion of intersectionality.
What does that mean?
Well, what it means is you can take particular examples
of media and action now that can be a particular
tv show or it can be a small group of
people who enjoy using social media or or fans of
a particular celebrity, anything that you are interested in, and
you can talk about how the particular things that are
happening in your media example, reveal general principles in media
culture. So we can use particular examples of media to
explain the structures of media cultures that exists in a
more general is double flange frame.
So in other words, if you're a fan of a
particular celebrity, looking at why you are the fan of
that particular celebrity will probably tell us something generally about
how celebrity as a whole functions as a particular kind
of media for.
So one of the things that we're looking at is
that in studies of gender, for example, whether we're looking
at and whether we're looking at why particular women celebrities
are popular, or if we're looking at why particular groups
of women are attracted to particular kinds of social engagement
through social media, what all of those things tend to
be about is the question of how we live gendered
identity in relation to media narratives, what that means is
that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the
way that we understand and live are gendered identities, draws
on media narratives, draws on media content and draws on
media cultures and that although that happens in a variety
of ways we can see those principles at play in
people's daily interactions with media cultures.
And so the point of all of this is to
show that the way media are produced and consumed is
meaningful and sensible now.
What do I mean by those two terms?
Well, the two terms, the reasons why we say that
is that firstly to say that media production and consumption
is meaningful is to say that it has a logic
and it has a significance.
So the production of media, for example, isn't simply about
entertainment or simply about attracting an audience, it's about putting
a meaningful reality experience together for audiences through particular processes
that arrange our world in a particular way.
And it's also sensible in the sense that there are
reasons behind people's pleasures in media that are worth exploring
and are really quite serious.
So it may seem that people are attracted to celebrity
for a range of fairly trivial reasons.
But and it may even seem that some of the
things that people do with media seem quite strange from
the outside.
So, for example, um, well, we're going to talk about
an example in a second.
Um, but if we look very closely at why people
engage with media, even if that media seems fairly trivial,
we quickly find that there are actually some fairly serious
reasons behind why people engage with media in the way
that they do.
Yeah, and that quite often selecting case studies that are
widely considered to be quite trivial or even dangerous is
a good way of underlining why media culture is really,
really serious now here.
Let me get you, let me take you to the
picture above.
So we've got sports fans versus boy band fans.
Now, I really like research on women or on on
on fans of boy bands, because this really demonstrates the
idea that apparently that forms of media engagement that the
world seems sees as kind of mad, bad or dangerous
are actually very interesting, very important and very serious.
So, if we look at the way that society considers
people who like boy bands, um and very often this
focuses on teenage girls, for example, what we see quite
often is that society worries about this kind of phenomenon.
So the sorts of women that we see being photographed
here in this photograph above, a group of young women
taking photographs of uh the latest boy band that's come
along, and quite often society sees this kind of activity
as silly.
It's kind of overly emotional, it's hysterical.
Um it's not something to be taken seriously because boy
bands themselves are fairly generic and not very interesting, and
they all look the same.
Of course, the point of um of the point of
this photograph is to show that when we talk about
the same sort, when we talk about male sports fans
very often we take them seriously, right.
If we talk about male sports fans, they're engaging with
sports teams.
Um and we take their passion very, very seriously.
Don't, no one thinks that men who show up to
sporting events dressed in a particular way and shouting and
screaming at the top of their lungs, no one thinks
they're silly or trivial.
Um but people quite often do think that when women
do the same thing in relation to boy bands or
in fact anybody who likes boy bands, um but equally
research on this area shows that that that people who,
like boy bands are driven by the same sorts of
motives. They're driven by the same sorts of desire to
be part of a community.
They're driven by the same sorts of desires to create
a public presence for themselves as you would see in
sports fans.
And so what we see in the different way that
people regard sports fans versus boy band fans is the
way the society makes gender distinctions.
Um so looking at an apparently trivial example of media
culture and action, such as people who like boy bands
can be a way of uncovering, for example, highly gendered
social distinctions.
So we can look at something that people think is
quite trivial and actually use that study to looking at
why do people engage with boy bands?
What are the social pleasures?
What is the social logic behind doing that?
And one of the things that we can find is
that quite often there are some very serious and well
thought out rationales behind engaging with forms of media that
the rest of the world doesn't take particularly seriously.
And so one of the things that that underlines is
the fact that one of the purposes of doing qualitative
research actually isn't finding answers, but it's learning to raise
important questions.
So, for example, if we look at people who like
boy bands, we're not trying to validate what they do
necessarily, but what we are trying to do is we're
trying to raise questions about how do people make social
distinctions through looking at the way that people consume different
types of media?
Why do we take sports fans far more seriously than
we take boy back than we take the fans of
boy bands?
Where do those distinctions come from?
What do they do in society?
Why do they matter?
And how can we find out how people use those
processes to make sense of their place in the world?
So what we're trying to do is we're trying to
find particular examples of media in action and we're trying
to relate them to general principles in major influence.
We're trying to take examples of media and action that
people find either mysterious or trivial or dangerous.
And we're trying to explain why they make sense from
either the point of view of how media produced or
consumed. We're learning that selecting case studies that people think
are trivial or mysterious or dangerous can be a really
useful way of showing how media has significant and structured
influences on society.
And we're becoming comfortable with the idea that research isn't
about finding answers, but quite often it's about problema ties
in knowledge and asking the correct questions.
And so those are the main learning outcomes that I