The article I choose this week concerning qualitative methods was Entertaining ideas: social issues in entertainment television from the journal Media, Culture & Society. The aim of this article was to further explore the possible educational potential of entertainment television. Entertainment television programming is not just for amusement but also touches on current social issues, even if their ways are somewhat unconventional.
The Method
They based their research off of 15 in-depth interviews with media professionals such as television writers, directors, and producers about how they balance making entertaining television as well as their responsibility to a unique media space for representing it as a social tool. The interviews focused on television programs that challenge traditional media framing of crimes against children, immigration, and disability within British television. These are the questions asked of the professionals in the survey:
1. Do media professionals recognize these representations as unconventional?
2. What does the research process suggest about the value of these programs?
3. Do media professionals understand their work as educational?
4. What do media professionals hope or expect viewers to get out of these programs?
By asking these questions they were hoping to fill a gap between entertainment-education information and media dissemination. All interviewees did acknowledge the unconventional design of their programming even if that wasn't their main goal. Also, the professionals do take notice when developing a program that they need to address the gaps created by the typical perspectives held for topics such as immigration and disability and research must be conducted on their part to aid in entertainment-education. For instance, media professionals sometimes choose actors with a certain disability to portray a character with the same affliction where the actor can draw from their own personal experiences to add to the creative process with more accuracy.
The benefits of using interviews in qualitative research is the in-depth, personal experiences and viewpoints that can be contributed to research. This can be quite helpful in research regarding social sciences because sometimes there is no concrete data with which to calculate a conclusion from. One disadvantage of qualitative interviewing is that they can be subjective and results can be complicated by the personalities and mood of the interviewee.
Reading assignment
The article on Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming was a very interesting article as I never thought about using RFID-type comic book style commands on a vacuum cleaner. I think the kind of interactions they are looking into are probably better suited for children's toys, such as the Pleo and I don't really want my appliances reacting to me with human-like "emotion" commands. However, maybe the study of this different type of programming could lead to a more functional uses for actDresses and similar technology.
Klein, Bethany. "Entertaining Ideas: Social Issues in Entertainment Television." Media, Culture & Society 33.6 (2011): n. pag. Web. 16 Nov. 2012. <http://mcs.sagepub.com.focus.lib.kth.se/content/33/6/905.full.pdf+html>
The research paper you've chosen adresses a very interesting question but maybe television is nowaday replaced by other online media to an extent. However, the research is interesting, another qualitative method to take on the same thought could be to look at what programms there are being brodcasted and maybe analyse them against some key criteria for educational prupose.
ReplyDeleteI don't think television is being replaced by online content but the medium of television has changed. Many people now view television content on-line as well. My bachelor's was in television production and my passion in that was always to not only entertain but to educate as well. Television can be an extremely effective learning tool and I think this article was trying to get producers and directors of the content to pay more attention to this.
ReplyDeleteI also loved the research about the well-dressed robots. At home we also had a Pleo a few years ago, it is interesting what else you can examine with these little robots. Have you ever had any experiences with robots or any other kind of these devices?
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