Doing Audience Ethnography: A Narrative Account of Establishing Ethnographic Identity and Locating Interpretive Communities in Fieldwork

Abstract

This article is an account of how ethnographic identity was constituted and how audiences were located during the early stages of an ethnography of television viewers in Mexico. The description takes a narrative form and details the field experience and acknowledges the visibility and self-interest of the ethnographer. Writing about the field experience in such a fashion is motivated by the fact that few studies of media reception provide discussion about the events that shaped the direction of the inquiry, the productive discomfort of the field encounter, selection and movements within the interpretive communities represented in studies, or relationships with various members of those communities. Moreover, a narrative account is helpful in demonstrating how the methodology that was developed evolved as a result of emerging relationships and contextual processes, not as a systematic design for finding a research “sample.”