'Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV': How methods make class in audience research

Skeggs, Bev; Thumim, Nancy and Wood, Helen. 2008. 'Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV': How methods make class in audience research. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(1), pp. 5-24. ISSN 1367-5494 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407084961

Keywords:

affect, audience research, methodology, morality, reality television, reflexivity, self, social class

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Sociology

Dates:

DateEvent
February 2008Published

Item ID:

2217

Date Deposited:

28 May 2009 09:54

Last Modified:

29 Apr 2020 15:27

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2217

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