Researching Black Communities: A Methodological Guide

16. Regarding Black Audiences: Qualitative Approaches to Studying Black Media Consumption

16 | Regarding Black Audiences: Qualitative Approaches to Studying Black Media Consumption Catherine Squires and Bambi Haggins Many scholars and social commentators have turned a critical eye toward representations of African Americans and racial issues across many genres, including news and political advertising (e.g., Dixon and Linz 2000; Entman 2000; Gilens 1999; Mendleberg 2001; Valentino 1999) and sports, advertising, and entertainment media (e.g., Dates and Barlow 1990; Gray 1995; Riggs 1991). These important critiques of content and assessments of media effects reveal an unsatisfying array of Black images in mainstream media with the exception of a few bright spots of innovation and inclusion of Black talent. Similarly, those who study the effects of negative racial representations and deployments of racialized political messages ‹nd that White audiences come away with skewed views of African American life and/or malformed opinions that reinforce harmful stereotypes. However, there has not been as much study of how African Americans themselves interpret or respond to media representations of their racial group. A few recent effects studies have investigated the impact of particular media, like rap music and music videos (e.g., Johnson, Jackson , and Gatto 1995; Ward, Hansbourough, and Walker 2005), and more work in this area is needed. But in addition to experimental research in the effects tradition and content and textual analyses, more audiencecentered studies—that is, research that focuses on African American audiences ’ interactions with and opinions of media texts—are needed to address a range of Black communities’ experiences with media. Qualitative methods, such as ethnographic and cultural-historical research , can lend insight into which cultural practices, rituals, or ideologies guide Black media consumers through what often seems like a mine‹eld of problematic images. Taking a close look at a small, wellde ‹ned audience can help us understand the new media environment faced by Black audiences. Herman Gray (2001) advises scholars to reexamine the guiding assumptions about mass media and racial representation . Speci‹cally, as we survey the world of 500 channels, the Internet, 289 niche publications, and cheaper independent digital production, we must recognize that all audiences face a new set of resources and challenges . Thus, racial groups that were ignored or defamed in the era when the Big Three television networks, local newspapers, and radio were the main choices may today interact with the new array of media outlets and opportunities quite differently. And, as advertisers and media producers seek to reach a global, ethnically and racially diverse pool of consumers, we may see changes in the range of texts available to those audiences, as well as changes in how audiences consume media. In the twenty-‹rst-century media environment, we argue that qualitative audience research, with its emphasis on audience agency and reading practices, can help us better understand how African Americans interact with the 500-channel, digital media landscape. The audience research tradition, although it does not offer the generalizations of survey research or the scienti‹c punch of experiments, does give us depth and detail into a given audience’s experiences with media. Focusing on the particular identity and culture of a speci‹c Black audience can elucidate important nuances and exceptions that are not the territory of quantitative methods. This is not to say that quantitative study of the audience is unhelpful; rather, because there has been so little research on Black audiences, the richer, if less generalizable, results of qualitative audience studies may serve as a foundation for future hypotheses and research designs in the quantitative traditions. For example, audience ethnographies may uncover themes and audience concerns that can be converted into frameworks for survey questionnaires. This chapter summarizes in›uential works in the growing ‹eld of Black audience studies and then turns to the details of a recent study completed by the authors. The study, a comparison of White and Black women’s reactions to popular comedies, builds upon key principles and innovations of prior studies and provides an illustration of the promise of audience ethnographies in the rapidly changing media environment. Qualitative Research with African American Audiences The forms of qualitative audience research most applicable to our project are those studies that foreground the readings of media texts by “active ”audiences—spectators and cultural readers—and the ways in which those readings correspond to the participants’ lay theories of identity formation and reception. In order to understand the studies summa290 | Researching Black Communities rized in the tables, one...