Pursuing Ethnographic “Closeness:” A Reflection on Race, Reality Television Audiences, and the Focus Group Encounter

ABSTRACT

Using fieldnotes and headnotes from a study I conducted on African American viewers of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta, this article evaluates the ethnographic potential of the focus group for audience studies researchers. In particular, I argue the focus group is a method that allows researchers to pursue “closeness”—a value ethnographers have long celebrated as essential for cultivating emic understandings of people and the lives they live. The article outlines two key strategies for achieving ethnographic “closeness” in focus group encounters – the construction of the focus group as a field site and recognition of the focus group as a point of access to the contexts audiences use to make sense of media texts. If properly executed, I conclude focus groups have the potential to effectively function as “safe spaces,” allowing participants to push back against damaging media representations and define themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• audience studies
• ethnography
• focus group methodology
• race
• reality television

Acknowledgments

I offer my sincerest thanks to the participants of this study, who shared a small piece of their lives with me. I also wish to acknowledge the faculty, staff, and students from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication who supported me throughout the data collection period of this study and commented on the earliest drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Thinking with anthropologist Simon Ottenberg, Taussig (2011) asserts “the headnotes – what you do not write down but keep inside your head – are ‘always more important than the fieldnotes,’” (p. 18).

2. The data referenced in this article was collected when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. My discussion of focus group data here is derived from one of six focus group sessions – my session with the Joneses and their friends. The session included four women and one man. All participants self-identified as African American, Black, or mixed race (Black and Asian). They all reported professional jobs and were coded as members of the “elite” fraction of the Black middle class (see K. Lacy, 2008). Pseudonyms are used throughout the article to protect the identities of my participants.

3. The word “housewife” appears in quotation marks because the women who are cast in the series frequently do not fit traditional definitions of the housewife. Many work outside of the home and some are not married.

4. It is important to note there are many ways to periodize and thematize the audience studies tradition in mass communication research. For another example, see Jensen and Rosengren (1990), who outline five moments: effects, uses and gratifications, literary criticism, cultural studies, and reception.

5. See Merton and Kendall (1946) for insight into how Mertonian focus groups were constructed.

6. The claim that focus groups emerged in this moment is somewhat overstated. As noted, focus groups were an important component of audience studies within the effects tradition. The key shift is in their being viewed as “ethnographic.” Then, a particular type of focus group or a new way of thinking about the method is what accompanied the incorporation/resistance moment.

7. While anthropologists, the recognized “gatekeepers” of “ethnography,” acknowledge the focus group as one available tool in the ethnographic arsenal, they often downplay the method and certainly consider it secondary to participant observation and even in-depth interviews (see Boellstorff et al., 2012). One must note, however, ethnographers are themselves embroiled in debates surrounding what counts as “ethnography,” especially in the context of an increasingly mediated environment. For a review of some of these debates, see Marcus (1995), Ginsburg et al. (2002), Coman (2005), and Jackson (2012).

8. This is a common misconception about the focus group. Even in its earliest iterations the focus group has always centered on participants’ and not researchers’ thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and experiences. Merton and Kendall (1946) describe “non-direction” as a foundational principle of the focus group: “It gives the subject an opportunity to express himself about matters of central significance to him rather than those presumed to be important by the interviewer,” (p. 545).

9. “Members” meanings” is a term Emerson et al. (1995) use to refer to emic understandings of a phenomenon.

10. Fiske (1992) defines “audiencing” as “an attempt to get glimpses of culture in practice that could be set in systemic relationship to other glimpses,” (p. 356).

11. Schatz’s (2009) edited volume, Political Ethnography, clearly outlines two ways of thinking about ethnography. The first is aligned with participant observation, while the second, views “ethnography [as] a sensibility that goes beyond face-to-face contact. It is an approach that cares – with the possible emotional engagement that implies – to glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality,” (p. 5).

12. See Moody (2014) for my analysis of focus group discussions about the show.

13. This quotation reveals some of the biases of the time, namely in its implication that ethnography was white men’s work – a way of thinking that has since been challenged and dismissed. See Harrison (2014) for one critique of Malinowski as related to questions of race.

14. I want to be careful not to overstate the limited access issue. There are examples of ethnographers who have studied media audiences in domestic contexts (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1997; Miller, 1992; Wilk, 1994).

15. For a different perspective on the blurred lines between “home” and “there” see Jackson (2013), in particular his discussion of the ethnographer as “already and always in the field” (p. 50) and the role of technology in shrinking the field/home divide (see chapters six and seven).

16. At the beginning of the focus group, participants were asked to describe the most memorable moment of the season. In response, Mia openly admitted, “I don’t trust editing” While she did not directly elaborate on this statement in the moment, potential reasons for why she admitted feeling that way became clearer following the postscript conversation. This mistrust can be tied to participants’ experiences with white privilege – those moments when Black voices are silenced, while white voices loudly project an edited “truth.”

17. Here, the participant references 50 Cent’s 2003 hit song, “P.I.M.P.,” which discusses the economic exploitation of women.

18. Also see Knoblauch (2005), he offers a similar argument for what he terms, “focused ethnography.”

19. Researchers who use sister circle or sister-girl talk methodology similarly rely on Black feminist scholarship as an anchor point for reimagining group discussions (see L. S. Johnson, 2015; M. C. C. Lacy, 2017; Mitchell et al., 2022). The intimacy of the sister circle, however, is reserved for Black women only. By definition, a male participant’s presence in our focus group disqualifies this discussion as a “sister circle.” It does not, however, affect its categorization as a “safe space,” a concept that can be applied more broadly. In this case, I was most interested in shared racial-cum-class experiences.

20. Lunt and Livingstone (1996) note one of the issues with “moderator” is that the label signals “neutrality,” an idea that critical scholars openly reject. A. Johnson (1996) introduces the role of “witness” as an alternative.

21. Here, I’m thinking with Peters (1999) who understands “communication” as “the project of reconciling self and other,” (p. 9). To begin to bridge the gap, he suggests our interactions should proceed “in such a way not that the self is authentically represented but that the other is caringly served,” (p. 268).