From Crossroads to Wife Swap

for someone who has worked with ethnography as a major method of research the idea of concentrating on yourself rather than the views of others is not an attractive proposition. However, it is still the stories of the respondents, which tell the story of my own academic route and writing. As an ethnographer working from cultural studies to media studies, concentrating on the television audience, it is in fact the revelations of audiences that have always informed, defined and ultimately determined the nature of the theories I have developed during the course of my own academic writing. My interest in the media audience came directly from work for my MA. When I spoke to young women at home with children, they saw television and radio as an important means of keeping up with events that they had lost touch with while away from work. But what is more these media connected them to areas of interest. Choosing to watch soap opera, drama, situation comedy and family stories, the women also saw the importance of news, current affairs and documentary series watched by their husbands – but ultimately rejected these programmes because the topics were too alien. Crime, war and hostilities were important, but not of interest to them. I chose to follow up by examining the relation of audiences to the media, particularly that of women, and the ways in which the media is implicated in the reproduction of the family and women’s social locations. I also saw the importance of the role played by programme producers and their intentions in making them. This formed the basis of my subsequent research. Which resulted in the publication of Crossroads that was undertaken as a very small part of my PhD research. I had looked at the production of a number of television programmes and had spoken to audiences about their viewing choices and opinions, but it was unexpected circumstances that resulted in the publication of the study. What is of interest for this article is that I did not set out to write this specific book, the research for which was only a fraction of a much larger study. From Crossroads to Wife Swap: Learning from Audiences

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