Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audiences

Against a backdrop of growing unease with traditional quantitative empirical research methods and an equal unease with abstract psychoanalytical models, ethnography is increasingly seen as one of the few empirical methods which is not completely undercut by contemporary theoretical work. Indeed, it is only recently that ethnography has begun to show its power to construct and explain in media studies. James Lull's work in this area has proved an influential model, and in this collection he covers writing on social uses, the case study of television use in the family, and ethnographic theory and method.