THE REALITY SHOW OF RESEARCH

Ethnography gets Answers without Asking

By Erwin Ephron

I remember meeting the legendary ethnographer Margaret Mead at a college graduation in Vermont. She was tall, in her 60’s and accompanied by an even taller staff. But not people. It was a giant walking stick which she used to climb to the podium.

Margaret Mead introduced me to ethnography. It is unabashed People Watching. The Reality Show of Research. It began during the Age of Exploration with the colonial office memo. Today, if you want to learn about how people behave with media in this complicated world, there is no better way than watching.

SNUBBED BY RESEARCHERS

Ethnography is snubbed by media researchers as primitive. It doesn’t use probability samples or passive meters. It simply describes what people do, and that’s a breath of fresh air.

Our traditional research standards are time-worn from living in the past. We poll people on behavior, testing that fraction of the population we hope will mirror the whole. We expect samples of thousands to tell us what millions are viewing. Flim-flammy as it seems, it works if it's the right thousands.

But today only a fraction of the people approached agree to cooperate in our surveys, so the basis of probability sampling is violated. We hide the fault by ignoring the problem. We use “standard error" tables, as if nothing has changed.

The truth is we have no firm idea how good, or bad, the numbers are, only circumstantial evidence. We try to eliminate bias and we know the data trend well because that’s what we need for a pricing system. But it would be more honest to mark the pages “reliability high, truth uncertain." Ethnography reports, but makes no claims.

THE COUNTING GAME

Another dilemma is our quest for objectivity. We would rather measure an audience by counting than by asking because we’ve learned that people make things up and fail to remember. We prefer objective measurements of behavior to personal recollection. Measurements delivered by a meter, not a memory, and the more passive the meter the better.

But we’re discovering objectivity brings its own issues. It substitutes what we can measure for what we want to know. When you remove the person’s judgment from the definition of exposure, it includes many who would not have thought themselves viewing or listening.

This is a disorderly world we tidy-up by counting. If we can occasionally watch people and check what they’re doing we’re far better off for it.

ETHNOGRAPHY IN ACTION

The Middletown Media Studies of Ball State University are a fruitful example of ethnography in action. Many analysts have looked at "media multi-tasking" with a note of anxiety because so little is known about its effect on advertising. The Middletown studies help us to understand what’s happening.

To begin with they suggest “multi-tasking” is the wrong word since in concurrent media exposure (they call it CME) there is usually a dominant medium. Ethnography observes that TV, because of its near universal presence within the media day, is the major component of CME. Media which can be experienced in a relatively passive, sustained fashion (TV, radio, etc.) often pair with interactive media (telephone, software, web, etc.) in CME episodes.

The Middletown studies find that at home, top-ranked pairings of media involve the television, in the workplace, the computer. TV and internet is the dominant CME pair by both incidence and time, across ages and genders. However the two media differ in profile with 80% of web exposure occurring concurrently compared to 29% of TV.

Concurrent media exposure is higher among women than men across all age groups; older participants tend to engage in more CME than younger participants. So much for our stereotypes.

THE DVR DEBATE

But ethnography is not limited to general patterns of media use. It can be bitingly specific.

I recently sat through a presentation of conventional research on the impact of DVR’s, those TV recorders that allow viewers to fast-forward through commercials. The comforting conclusion was “Commercial skipping is not the primary reason for owning a DVR.” Time shifting was limited to a fraction of viewing time. But the bigger unasked question, “are viewers paying attention to commercials?” was ignored.

Ask the Ethnographer. One study had 325 Chicago area college students covertly observe a member of their family to record how they watched television during prime time.

The focus was on behavior: What are the people doing just before a commercial appears? How do they react when it appears? What do they do while it is on the air?

This ethnographic research observed that viewers paid direct attention to TV commercials about half of the time.

You haven’t heard much about the study because it was done in 1966 by ethnographer Gary Steiner – and his tall staff.

- March 9, 2006 -

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