Seeing, Thinking, Feeling: A Critical Reflection on Interview-based Methods for Studying News Use

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide a resource for journalism researchers looking to use a qualitative approach to study news use. It seeks to go beyond justifying qualitative methods vis-à-vis quantitative methods and to be more reflective and critical regarding the limitations and possibilities of the qualitative interview. Making the case for taking experience as point of departure for studying news use, the article explicates this notion by drawing from different theoretical conceptions of experience. Based on three recent user studies, the article critically reflects upon three interview-based methods that center around users’ experience of news use—the think-aloud protocol, watching and discussing news, and the two-sided video-ethnography—and discusses their theoretical, methodological and epistemological implications. A common thread emerging from the different user studies is that people require support to be able to access and communicate their experiences of news use. The methods discussed proved successful at doing so, respectively by having informants comment on what they saw right in front of them (see), by giving them the tools and the vocabulary to reflect on a prior experience (think), and by bringing them in touch with their sensations of using news (feel).

KEYWORDS:

• Experience
• think-aloud protocol
• news use
• qualitative interviewing
• ethnography
• journalism
• news consumption
• day-in-the-life interview

Introduction

Although when it comes to studying news use quantitative methods have dominated qualitative (Kümpel, Karnowski, and Keyling 2015) and especially ethnographic (Hartley 2008; Bird 2011) methods, recently there has been an undeniable surge in qualitative, interview-based studies (e.g., Edgerly 2017; Swart, Peters, and Broersma 2018; Toff and Palmer 2018; Ytre-Arne and Moe 2018; Kümpel 2019). Following Crang’s (2002, 649) statements about a similar development in Human Geography two decades earlier, it could be argued that the time has come for news audience researchers to go “beyond simply championing or justifying qualitative methods” vis-à-vis quantitative methods and to be more reflective and critical regarding the limitations and possibilities of the qualitative interview.

The aim of this article is therefore to push forward thinking about qualitative interviews for studying news use, and to provide a useful resource to help journalism researchers looking to study news use qualitatively select an interview-based method suitable and appropriate for their particular research aims. Making the case for taking experience as point of departure for studying news use (Costera Meijer 2006, 2013, 2016), the article explicates this notion by synthesizing four different theoretical perspectives on experience. On a more practical level, it also critically reflects on three interview-based methods that center around users’ experience of news use—the think-aloud protocol, watching and discussing news, and the two-sided video-ethnography—and discusses their theoretical, methodological and epistemological implications.

Challenges of interviews for studying news use

Although the term “experience” is often used in interview-based studies of news use, it is rarely explicated. Experience is typically used to refer to people’s individual, subjective, lived experiences that are not directly accessible to researchers, and may be contrasted with “individual behavior” (Carù and Cova 2008) which can be observed by “external” researchers. The main question then becomes how to access these subjective experiences, for they can only be reached through people’s expressions, which Bruner (1986, 9) describes as people’s “articulations, formulations, and representations of their own experience” (see also Carù and Cova 2008).

Before explicating the notion of experience, it is useful to consider some of the challenges that arise when using (qualitative) interviews to study people’s experience of news use. First, there is the difficulty for people to access and verbalize their own internal state. Putting one’s experiences into words requires not only substantial self-reflection but also significant narrative abilities: do they possess the vocabulary to express what is inside their mind? People also have trouble accurately self-reporting their news use (Rosenstein and Grant 1997; Prior 2009), which becomes a more urgent problem in today’s media environment in which people live not “with” but “in” media (Deuze 2011). In a “media life” (Deuze 2011), can people be expected to remember the news they use or encounter throughout their day, let alone the details of their experiences? Relatedly, people’s expressions naturally only express dimensions of their experiences that they are consciously aware of, potentially excluding subtle aspects of news use—such as sensation and tactility—that do form part of people’s experiences but are difficult to grasp and communicate. There is also the concern of social desirability: whether purposefully or not, people tend to tell stories to make themselves look or feel favorable, especially regarding a topic so normatively loaded as news use. Finally, since news and journalism play a dominant role in public discourse—not in the last place due to journalism’s tendency to be self-referential (Kristensen and Mortensen 2016)—there is the possibility that people draw from available, existing narratives about news to construct their own stories: “folk theories of journalism” (Nielsen 2016). While such stories are certainly informative about how people relate to journalism, they may tell us less about the details of their actual everyday news use.

Making the case for experience

The notion of experience could help overcome some of these challenges of the qualitative interview. In particular, four perspectives on experience can help explicate the notion and make it productive for studying news use. First, experience can be seen as something an individual has actually undergone or is undergoing (Tuan 1977). What follows is that experiences might be more revealing about people’s actual news use than their views or opinions (Costera Meijer 2013). News, in particular, is a subject almost everyone has an opinion about. Langer (1998) uses the term “the lament” to refer to the oft-espoused criticism that television news has undermined journalism's primary role in liberal democracy—namely to inform citizens—by, essentially, moving toward entertainment. Research has shown that a similar refrain can be heard among news users, and yet this does not necessarily stop them from consuming said news (Costera Meijer 2006). The question for interviews then becomes how to foreground not people’s opinions but their actual experiences of news.

Second, experience is an inclusive concept that allows for a broad spectrum of dimensions related to people’s news use to be included. Different dimensions are emphasized throughout the wide variety of definitions of experience. An example of an inclusive definition is Gentikow’s (2005, in Ytre-Arne 2011, 473) description of media experience:

Experience encompasses practical encounters with facts and events of the world, physical and perceptual contact with people and things. Experiences are made primarily by our bodies and senses, are processed cognitively, are learned of, and result in skills, knowledge and values.

This definition of experience is helpful because it allows for a focus beyond what is most common within news use research—namely a focus on cognition and behavior—toward (among others) material, perceptual, aesthetic, emotional and communicative dimensions of news use (Gentikow 2005, in Ytre-Arne 2011). A similar but equally extensive definition is Gentile, Spiller, and Noci’s (2007) notion of “consumer experience”, which conceptually distinguishes between six experiential components: sensorial, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic (usability), lifestyle (values), and relational (social). The question then becomes how one can design an interview-based study that allows for multiple or all of these dimensions to (potentially) be included or touched upon.

Third, experience can refer to different modes of knowing. Tuan (1977) describes experience as follows:

[…] a cover-all term for the various modes through which a person knows and constructs a reality. These modes range from the more direct and passive senses of smell, taste, and touch, to active visual perception and the indirect mode of symbolization. (8)

These three “modes” of experience may be called sensation, perception, conception (cf. Oakeshott 1933). Applied to news use, sensation (feeling) would entail tactile and other sensory dimensions of news use, such as handling and navigating one’s device. Perception (seeing) would refer to the becoming aware and processing of what users see right in front of them, including their first impression of and immediate reaction to content as well as the usability of a medium. Conception (thinking) would entail the more cognitive and symbolic dimensions such as understanding, sense-making, interpretation, evaluation and judgment of news content. Sensation has been particularly overlooked in studies of news use, even though material and sensory dimensions have been shown to impact people’s experience of news and other types of media (Ytre-Arne 2011; Zerba 2011; Fortunati, Taipale, and Farinosi 2015). Journalism scholars have consequently barely tapped into news users’ embodied ways of knowing, which refers to knowledge people “know” in and with their body but may not be able to communicate verbally (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Pink and Leder Mackley 2013; Moores 2015). A focus on sensation answers recent calls for non-representational approaches to media use (Couldry 2012; Moores 2012) as well as calls for (more) attention to haptic dimensions of media use and affiliated embodied ways of knowing (Parisi, Paterson, and Archer 2017; Richardson and Hjorth 2017). However, as Paterson (2009) points out, overcoming the challenge of bridging “that gap between experiencing the feeling body and expressing it” (784) requires methodological innovation.

Fourth, the notion of experience allows for “temporal reflexivity” (Carlson and Lewis 2019) regarding one’s methodologies and their epistemological consequences. A useful source of inspiration here is Throop (2003), who in order to ensure that “experience is explored ethnographically throughout the entire range of its various articulations” calls for using methods that “differentially access both prereflective and reflective varieties of experience” (235). He builds upon Schrag’s (1969) distinction between “granular” and “coherence” theories of experience, which view experience respectively as lacking or forming connection and consistency. Throop (2003) cites Turner’s (1982) reading of German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between erleben, “the immediate ‘living through of experience’ as a sequence of events,” and erlebnis, “the retrospective attribution of meaning tied to the structuring of ‘experience’ as a particular coherent form or unit” (Throop 2003, 223). This distinction can serve as a starting point for a temporally reflexive methodological approach to capturing experience. Throop (2003, 235) argues for:

[…] the importance of employing methodological strategies that complement the collection of explicitly retrospective assessments—in the form of the recollective meaning seeking that often emerges in the context of interviews, questionnaires and other forms of elicitation that depend upon those explicit reflective processes that tend to give coherence and definite form to experience—with strategies such as the video taping and/or systematic observation of everyday interaction that focuses upon capturing the often pre-reflective, real-time unfolding of social action.

Most interview-based studies of news use are retrospective: people are generally asked to reflect on their overall experience with news or to recount a past experience. One example is the day-in-the-life interview (e.g., Del Rio Carral 2014; Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2014), which—applied to news use—starts with the following question: “Imagine: it’s a weekday, your alarm goes off. What is the first moment you encounter news?”, followed repeatedly by “What is the next moment you encounter news?” While a useful strategy to get an overall view of people’s (perceived) news usage patterns, it faces some of the challenges of interview-based news use research mentioned earlier, such as having informants speak in (relative) generalities and misremember or forget details. As argued, foregrounding the notion of experience could help overcome these challenges.

It is at this point that the four perspectives on experience can be synthesized and used productively to make the case for three different interview-based methodologies suitable for studying news use: the think-aloud protocol, watching and discussing news, and the two-sided video-ethnography. Table 1 provides an overview of how the synthesis of the perspectives culminates in these three different approaches. These methods will be discussed and illustrated in detail in the sections that follow. First, the think-aloud protocol has a real-time orientation, aimed at capturing people’s experience as they are undergoing it (erleben). The mode of knowing that is central here is perception: what informants see in the moment. Because of its focus on the here and now, the experiential dimensions of new use that this approach emphasizes (or privileges) are cognitive, emotional and pragmatic: what informants are currently cognitively processing, what they are feeling, and what they practically “run” into (e.g., usability). Second, the approach of watching and discussing news has a retrospective orientation: informants reflect on an erlebnis, an experience they have already undergone. This can be tied to the mode of knowing conception, where experiences are (retrospectively) given “coherence and definite form” (Throop 2003, 235). In terms of experiential dimensions of news use, this method gives access to not only cognition and emotion, but also values and relations, which refer respectively to people’s moral evaluation of the news and how they situate themselves vis-à-vis (the people involved in) the news. Finally, in the two-sided video-ethnography, the two temporal orientations are combined, capturing both the undergoing and the having undergone of an experience. Because it captures the undergoing uninterruptedly—as will be explained in detail below—this approach gives access not only to perception and conception, but also to sensation: sensorial dimensions of news use such as touch. As such, this method captures the widest array of experiential dimensions. It should be emphasized that it is by no means impossible to access other experiential dimensions per method than the ones suggested here; rather, indicated are the dimensions of experience that, in the user studies that this articles draws from, were privileged or emphasized by using each of the methods.

Table 1. Three interview-based methodologies for studying news use.

Methodology	Theoretical perspective on experience
	Temporal organization	Erleben/erlebnis	Mode of knowing	Experiential dimensions accessed
Think-aloud protocol	real-time	erleben (undergoing)	perception	cognitive emotional pragmatic
Watch & discuss	Retrospective	erlebnis (having undergone)	conception	cognitive emotional lifestyle (values) relational
Two-sided video-ethnography	Both	Both	perception conception sensation	sensorial cognitive emotional pragmatic lifestyle (values) relational

In what follows, Table 1 will be illustrated through a critical reflection on the use of these methodologies in several recent studies of news use.

Concurrent think-aloud protocol

As Table 1 suggests, the aim of the first method is to have news users actively undergo something (erleben) in order to get insight into their real-time, in-the-moment experiences—into their “stream of consciousness” (James 1890). The concurrent think-aloud protocol has participants think out loud while performing a task (Ericsson and Simon 1993; Van Den Haak, de Jong, and Jan Schellens 2003). This method was used in a study that explored why people do and do not click on online news (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2018). Informants were asked to browse news on their own device of choice (smartphone, computer, laptop, tablet) as they normally would and to verbalize their thoughts, feelings and actions. The retrospective variant of the think-aloud protocol—in which informants comment on their experience after the fact—was tested as well, but it proved difficult for informants to remember the details of their browsing experiences. This was problematic because the study sought to capture people’s instantaneous thoughts and immediate reactions.

While less appropriate for capturing informants’ reflections about news (content) because thinking aloud impeded their processing of information, the concurrent think-aloud protocol proved most useful for capturing how informants browsed and navigated news as well as their considerations while doing so. Thirty distinct considerations people had for clicking or not clicking on news were found, categorized into cognitive, affective and practical (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2018). These considerations are similar to what Gentile, Spiller, and Noci (2007) have classified as cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic components of consumer experiences. Other research using the concurrent think-aloud protocol to research online information seeking behavior has found similar categories (Branch 2000; Macias, Lee, and Cunningham 2018).

A dilemma emerged when informants did not always comment on their non-clicking behavior. Since the study also explored why people do not click, a modification of the protocol was required. Informants often failed to comment on the headlines they skipped, because they decided whether or not to click very quickly. The decision was therefore made to occasionally interrupt them to ask why they did not click. An alternative would have been to record their browsing practices and watch and discuss these with the informants, but that likely would have caused them to forget their reasons for not clicking. It also would not have captured their initial, first impression of the news.

A criticism here could be that this interruption gave informants an opportunity to reflect and thus gave “coherence and definite form” (Throop 2003, 235) to their experiences—which goes against the very aim of capturing their initial thoughts and gut reactions. This could also potentially have led them to measure their expressions (e.g., give socially desirable answers). However, informants were asked to comment on behavior they were in the middle of; if concerned with making themselves look favorable, this likely would have manifested in their browsing behavior itself rather than in their commentary on it. While it is certainly possible that this impacted the selection choices of some informants, the bluntness of their real-time commentary on why they did or did not click—e.g., not knowing what the words in a headline meant, or “drowning” in news about the Syrian Civil War—suggests that most informants were not primarily concerned with coming across as “good citizens”. It could be argued that their being engaged in the experience (erleben) to a certain extent insulated them from imbuing this experience with meaning from beyond the activity at hand.

A second criticism could be that the interruptions disrupted the flow of people’s news use. Indeed, as will be discussed later, this was the reason the two-sided video-ethnography combined a real-time and a retrospective approach by first capturing users’ practices and then watching and discussing these with them. However, this combined approach risks losing the subtle, nuanced details that informants’ real-time commentary captures. In fact, the video-ethnography showed that people have limited ability to recount the details of their news use, including which articles they had read, let alone why they quickly skipped over certain headlines. Somewhat interrupting the flow of their news use was therefore a necessary compromise to capture their concurrent thoughts and feelings. The main value of the concurrent think-aloud protocol, then, is that it captures informants’ first impressions while using news, making it especially useful for studying (first) encounters with (new) media and for capturing how users orient themselves and make sense of a media environment as they go. As somewhat of a side note, the think-aloud protocol also appears suitable for “checking” informants’ statements in real-time. In a different study (Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2014), one informant stated he would “absolutely” find it “delightful” if sports news no longer appeared on his news websites or apps. When he mentioned that such personalization was possible in the news app (Nu.nl) he used, and was asked to show how he had done so, the following exchange ensued:

Interviewer:

Mm-hmm, and did you do that?

Informant:

Hmm yeah, I’ve looked into it at least. […]

Interviewer:

Could you show me? Because it’s [the app] on your phone.

Informant:

I’m not sure if I have this on Nu.nl. […] Before you were able to set up your favorite categories. (looks on phone)

Interviewer:

And did you set it up?

Informant:

Well that’s not possible anymore […] so yeah, forget that whole remark, because I don’t recall exactly how it was.

Interviewer:

But uh, if you could, you would gladly throw out sports.

Informant:

Yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Although this informant expressed enthusiasm for personalizing his news app, when going through the app in real-time he “admitted” he had not done so. In retrospect, this might be interpreted slightly differently: while the think-aloud protocol remains a suitable method for uncovering discrepancies between what informants say they want and what they do, rather than thinking of this in terms of “checking” informants’ statements, it is perhaps more useful to see such statements as expressing sincere desires that in their implementation are held back by obstacles. It then becomes the researcher’s task to find out what these obstacles are. In this particular case, it was not worth the informant’s effort to actually go in and change the settings.

Watching and discussing news

The aim of the second method is to have people reflect on a past experience (erlebnis) to obtain a more reflective perspective on their news use. As noted, most interview-based studies are retrospective, usually asking informants to reflect on their overall experience with news. This risks that while informants may tell (more or less) coherent stories, they might speak in generalities and misremember or forget details. In one study (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2017), informants were therefore asked to reflect on an immediately prior news experience, so as to let them form more or less coherent thoughts while still being grounded in an actual and “accessible” (i.e., rememberable) experience. Put simply, informants were given just enough time to process the news and reflect on it.

Taking current affairs TV as a case study, this study sought to move beyond viewers’ opinion toward their experience of captivating political information. A challenge here was to get informants to talk about concrete elements in the news they might find captivating. During the think-aloud protocol in the previously mentioned study, several informants indicated that they found it hard to say their thoughts and considerations out loud while at the same time focus on reading news items and processing information. For the clicking study, the latter was not essential as the focus was on people’s considerations for (not) clicking, not their engagement with or experience of the content itself. For this study centered around conception, however, commenting on news in real time was not an option. The approach chosen instead was to have informants first watch clips from current affairs TV shows and then immediately afterward interview them about their experience of these clips.

What proved essential was to include clips with a variety of content and narrative forms, in order to stimulate informants’ “narrative production”, which Holstein and Gubrium (2003, 75) define as “intentionally [provoking responses] by indicating—even suggesting—narrative positions, resources, orientations, and precedents”. This approach enlarged informants’ discursive space: being shown diverse clips gave them the tools to imagine and discuss concrete elements that would make for a captivating news item. It offered them a “vocabulary” of concrete dimensions to refer to, enabling them not only to provide a considered, nuanced and normative evaluation of the items they watched but also suggest concrete suggestions for improvement (i.e., how to make the items more captivating).

What can therefore be concluded is that this retrospective approach grounded in an immediately preceding experience is a fruitful way to capture how people experience and make sense of news content and form (which in practice are usually not seen as separate by informants). The main finding of the study was that informants were able to distinguish between two viewing experiences: “enjoyment” and “appreciation” (Bartsch and Schneider 2014; Oliver and Bartsch 2010). Enjoyment is characterized by pleasure in the sense of fun and amusement and is associated with a lean-back viewing practice in which the news often functions as “background noise” or “companionship” (Lull 1990), whereas appreciation is associated with concentrated, lean-forward viewing and is characterized by a willingness to invest time in exchange for gaining insight and learning new perspectives (an aha-experience) (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2017). In terms of Gentile, Spiller, and Noci’s (2007) components of consumer experiences, this method thus captured cognitive and emotional dimensions of news use, as well as relational and lifestyle (value). The latter two refer to, respectively, how informants situated themselves vis-à-vis (people in) the news (e.g., politicians’ talk being too abstract) and their moral judgments of the news and the journalists responsible for it (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2017). Richardson, Parry, and Corner (2012) who had focus group participants discuss short political media clips reported similar categories.

A possible criticism here, too, is that informants gave socially desirable answers regarding what they should like to see in current affairs TV. This criticism can also be countered, first, by informants’ frank “admitting” of enjoying what they considered to be less quality news. Still, epistemologically, it is worth considering the truth status of their claims about wanting to see thought-provoking, knowledge-yielding items. One argument against doubting the sincerity of their claims is that their suggestions for making items captivating did not simply adhere to conventional standards of quality news (i.e., objective, neutral, balanced). Instead, informants provided detailed accounts of changes they would like to see and elements they appreciated, afforded by the variety of clips they watched which enlarged their discursive space. For instance, they said they wanted to have explained what exactly the Dutch States-Provincial [regional government] do and why that matters for their everyday life. If unconvinced by this argument, informants being able to differentiate between the experiences of enjoyment and appreciation is significant in itself: it indicates that—even if they do not do so in practice—they want themselves to watch thought-provoking, knowledge-yielding items. In other words, at the very least, this retrospective (but grounded in an immediately prior experience) approach is a fruitful way of understanding what people’s ideal selves would watch. The next challenge then becomes to explore what holds them back from doing so and how they can be enabled to do so.

Two-sided video-ethnography

As suggested by Table 1, the aim of the third method is to tap into people’s embodied knowledge (sensation) by having them undergo something (erleben) without interruption and then have them reflect on this experience in retrospect (erlebnis). This should make less tangible dimensions of news use accessible and discussable. In a study that sought to capture news use more “holistically” (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2019), the main challenge was how to capture sensory, tactile dimensions of news use that informants themselves may not be aware of.

A method was needed that enabled informants to “look in” and reflect on their own (uninterrupted) news use. To this end, the “two-sided video-ethnography” was developed. Tested first was video re-enactment, which has participants perform activities on camera as they normally would and answer questions from the researcher, resulting in a collaborative understanding of the practices re-enacted (Pink and Leder Mackley 2014). A benefit of this approach is that when the re-enactment diverges from “what is ‘normally’ done” (147), the informant can demonstrate what the practice would typically entail (e.g., “Usually I drink a cappuccino, but I ran out of coffee”). However, re-enactment interrupts the flow of the practice, because informants reflect and comment on activities they normally do more or less automatically. For instance, one informant scrolled through his Facebook-app rapidly, deciding whether or not to read news in a fraction of a second. Having him reflect on this would take out the speed that is so central to his Facebook experience. Second, while using news, informants used gestures to explain what they were doing, running counter to the aim of capturing their “natural” news use and especially the sensory and tactile dimensions involved.

Instead, a method was developed based on Lahlou’s (2011) Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE), which consists of three parts: a first-person capture recording of the activity, a “confrontation interview” with the informant, and discussing the analysis with the informant. However, this method was adapted for the specific purpose of uncovering hidden and unspoken dimensions of news use. First, informants were filmed from two sides while they used news in real time: a frontal perspective to capture informants’ position, posture, gestures and expressions, and an over-the-shoulder perspective to capture the device and the content of the news they saw and used as well as their micro-gestures. Following Silverstone’s (1994) notion of the double articulation of media as material objects and conveyors of meaningful messages, filming participants from two sides allowed for exploration of informants’ engagement (or lack thereof) with news media as both texts and objects. An over-the-shoulder perspective was chosen instead of a wearable, first-person camera (e.g., Cordelois 2010; Lahlou 2011; Pink 2015) for two reasons: first, it was crucial to record the content of the medium clearly and stably, so it could be viewed and discussed with the informant. Second, participants’ micro-gestures (swiping, flipping, etc.) also needed to be recorded. The latter is also why other elicitation techniques such as capturing screen data (e.g., Kümpel 2019) were less useful for the aims of this particular study.

The next step was to watch and make sense of the videos with each informant individually. Rather than “confrontation interview” (Lahlou 2011), the term viewing session is preferred here, as the session was imagined as a joint knowledge-constructing activity rather than an interview in which the informant is confronted with their own behavior. This term was also preferred over “reconstruction interview”, subscribing to Pink’s (2013) idea that a video does not take us “back” but rather “invites us to move forward with it and as such to make new knowledge as we engage with it” (107). The viewing sessions helped uncover hidden and unspoken dimensions of news use for two reasons. First, they provided an uninterrupted view of the flow and the speed that are so characteristic of news practices like checking (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2015). Second, most importantly, they made informants conscious of dimensions of their own news practices they were not aware of while they were undergoing the experience (erleben). It proved helpful for both researcher and informant to be able to pause or rewind the video during the viewing sessions, enabling informants to recall and comment upon the actions they performed. Looking “in” on their own news use made them aware of embodied, subconscious and habitual dimensions and thus enabled discussion of them. Following the grounded theory method (Corbin and Strauss 1990), discussions about the findings among researchers also proved helpful for making sense of the data. Finally, subscribing to the idea of a collaborative knowledge construction, the (initial) findings were shared with the informants for additional feedback and sense-making.

While fitting within the tradition of using elicitation techniques to help informants talk about their experiences, the two-sided video-ethnography’s combination of capturing news use in real time (without interruption) with watching and reflecting on this use retrospectively makes it especially useful for capturing material and sensory dimensions of news use that users themselves (or researchers) are not aware of. A notable finding in the study was that people’s handling and navigation of their devices and platforms impacted their experience of news in ways they themselves had not realized (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2019). Results also showed the deep interconnectedness of different dimensions of news experiences. For instance, what might be called “measured avoidance”—which fits somewhere between the categories of news-seeking and news avoidance—refers to people’s careful measuring of and slaloming around (negative) content to protect their frame of mind. One informant “felt” her way through Facebook, her finger ready to scroll away if news hit her emotionally. Another skipped heavy content in her newspaper after the first pages to preserve her weekend mood. This notion of measured avoidance also adds to mood management theory (Zillmann 1988), showing that the optimization of one’s mood through content choices occurs at the most micro of levels—down to the scanning of words in a news item to establish its tone or valence—and is actively negotiated throughout one’s news practice. Another example is the notion of place-making (Tuan 1977; Ingold 2000; Pink 2012): how people create a sense of home through their news use. Two powerful illustrations of the interconnection between different dimensions of experience are the informant who subscribed to a newspaper to recreate a sense of nostalgia but found herself struggling with the negative content, and the informant who simultaneously snacked news websites and watched a familiar TV show to create a comfortable atmosphere in which she was then comfortable consuming news (see Groot Kormelink and Costera Meijer 2019). The two-sided video-ethnography thus captured the various components of Gentile, Spiller, and Noci’s (2007) notion of experience: sensorial, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic, lifestyle, and relational dimensions of news use.

Epistemologically, this method makes previously “hidden” knowledge visible and thus researchable. The strength of this approach is that it combines an emic and etic approach (Pike 1967). It centers on the news user’s experience while simultaneously enabling an outsider’s perspective; indeed, in this study, informants themselves were both subject and observer. They gained insight into their own practices. A special added value of the two-sided video-ethnography—as compared to a screen capture method—is that it also captures tactile dimensions such as gestures which helped make sense of subtle aspects of their use that might not have been captured otherwise (e.g., the embodied sense of urgency during scrolling).

The two-sided video-ethnography also captured a different phenomenon that has methodological and epistemological implications: informants made sense of whatever information was presented to them. For instance, one informant declared he had skipped an article in his newspaper, but when the researcher pointed out that the video recording suggested otherwise, he “corrected” his story by explaining why he had in fact read the article. This serves as a reminder that people are naturally inclined to come up with narratives (Gottschall 2012; Heider and Simmel 1944), in this case perfectly reasonable explanations for their own behavior. This has implications for all studies using elicitation techniques that “confront” users with their own behavior. In particular, methods that capture less contextual details—e.g., logs of use—seem more likely to produce—to use Blackmore’s (2017, 73) phrase—“plausible confabulations”. The two-sided video-ethnography mitigates this risk somewhat by capturing news practices more holistically and by watching the recordings immediately afterward, making it easier to become aware of inconsistencies between the informants’ recollection and/or expressions and the recorded practice.

Concluding remarks

This article has tried to push forward thinking about studying news use through qualitative interviews, by critically reflecting on the theoretical underpinnings, methodological design and epistemological implications of three interview-based approaches. One common thread that emerged from the different studies is that informants required assistance to be able to access and communicate their experiences of news use. The methods discussed each were successful at stimulating informants’ “narrative production” (Holstein and Gubrium 2003), respectively by having informants comment on what they saw right in front of them (see), by giving them the tools and the vocabulary to reflect on a prior experience (think), and by bringing them in touch with their sensations of using news (feel). Table 1 summarizes which dimensions of experiences can be accessed and communicated through each of the three methods. This overview might serve as a resource for researchers to make well-considered decisions when using qualitative interviews to study news use.

It may be tempting to conclude that of the three methods, the two-sided video-ethnography is the ideal method when studying news use, as due to its combination of a real-time and a retrospective orientation, it captures the widest range of dimensions, including sensorial experiences that may be difficult to capture otherwise. However, what is the ideal method is dependent on one’s particular research aim, and there are certainly situations where either real-time or retrospective methods are more appropriate. For instance, real-time methods like the concurrent think-aloud protocol are more suitable when one is looking to capture people’s instantaneous reactions (perception), such as the first impression of a new medium or the perceived usability of a new product. Retrospective methods like watching and discussing news clips are more suitable when one is interested in capturing people’s understanding or sense-making (conception) of news, as this approach foregrounds the content of the news (which may very well become secondary in the two-sided video-ethnography). In both cases, it is more useful to concentrate on these concrete aspects of news use rather than capture the widest array of experiential dimensions.

Throughout this article it was suggested that the healthy skepticism that (likely) characterizes most researchers’ approach toward informants and their expressions, might be replaced by a different researcher-informant relationship. Rather than suspecting socially desirable answers produced to make informants look favorable, it might be more fruitful to view their expressions, if diverging from their actual everyday news practices, as manifestations of sincere desires, the realization of which is obstructed by certain obstacles. As Madianou (2009, 334) suggests, we might conceive of our informants as “people”, which means they are complex beings full of contradictions, shaped by everyday (power) structures. Approaching informants as people means putting oneself—as the researcher—in the position of an enabler or facilitator, whose main responsibility is to make informants feel comfortable sharing their sometimes conflicting practices and desires. While certainly no guarantee to completely rule out social desirability bias, throughout the studies drawn from in this article, the following four very concrete, hands-on strategies appeared helpful in making informants feel at ease to share what might be considered “less desirable” news behavior. First, in interviews it is essential to emphasize that it is the informant’s own experience one is after, by underlining that anything they say is of value, regardless of how insignificant it may seem to them. One particular strategy that is most suitable as a warm-up exercise is the day-in-the-life method, mentioned earlier in this article: it puts informants at easy to talk about themselves, since its questions are readily answerable and there are no right or wrong answers. Second, when explaining one’s method of choice to the informant, it is useful to demonstrate it in a way that signals that (supposedly) less desirable news habits can safely be shared. For instance, while explaining the think-aloud protocol the researcher might share something revealing about their own news habits: “First I always scan the main headlines but to be honest then I usually then go straight to the media section.” Third, careful follow-up questions are essential to help differentiate between informants’ actual and desired news behavior. For instance, if an informant says they prefer a certain type of news, one could ask—depending on one’s rapport with the informant—indirect questions like “Could you explain what you prefer about it?” or more direct ones such as “If you’re being very realistic, how often do you actually consume this type of news?” and “Could you try to think of what stops you from consuming this type of news more regularly?” Finally, understanding news use from the user’s perspective does not mean taking whatever they say at face value; it is essential to recognize the limits of their self-awareness. Methodologically, most helpful here might be the combination of retrospective and real-time approaches, which enables the informant to provide their perspective and share their experiences, while also becoming aware of the limits of their self-understanding. This allows for straight-forward questions such as “You mentioned [this] but the recording shows [that]. Could you clarify?” Combining such emic and etic approaches could be an important move forward in capturing and making sense of everyday news use: it both values people’s own expertise about their behavior and their experiences and complements this with an outsider’s perspective which they themselves—together with the researcher—are also made part of. It must be emphasized that this should not end with a researching “checking” informants’ expressions but with a joint effort to make sense of their behavior and their experiences.

While this article has focused on methods for studying news use, its insights may also be relevant for other areas of journalism studies, such as news production. In particular, while real-time methods such as newsroom ethnographies and retrospective methods like reconstruction interviews (Reich 2009) are common, approaches that combine the two—such as the two-sided video-ethnography—could be a relevant addition to ethnographic fieldwork, potentially revealing subtle (embodied) dimensions of news work difficult to capture through other interview methods.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes out to the two anonymous reviewers: it was truly a joy revising this article thanks to your thoughtful, constructive and elaborate suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Tim Groot Kormelink http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5374-7536

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of the research project “The New News Consumer: User-Based Innovation to Meet Paradigmatic Change in News Use and Media Habits,” supported by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [314-99-103] and ten Dutch journalism organizations (see http://www.news-use.com); Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.