The preceding chapter has situated my project within the literature of various fields of cultural study and their nexus with media research. This chapter now explains the methodological and practical research approaches that are implied by my engagement with those interconnected fields as well as those that are implied by the
‗collaborative‘ nature of the study. In many ways this chapter describes the bridge between the theoretical and practical aspects of my research, justifying my research design within the theoretical fields in which it is situated and the practical
application to which I put it. It continues therefore to explain why this specific production study has the form and content that it does. The chapters that follow will examine the Children‘s Department at BBC Scotland as a specific production
institution; this chapter describes my methodological approach to this research, providing a reflexive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of my methodology and research design.
My overarching frame of reference for this thesis is that of television production studies. As such, the research has employed a combination of critical research methodologies within an extended case study of BBC Scotland Children‘s Department. Bearing in mind Mayer, Banks and Caldwell‘s exhortations to
scepticism in production studies, in which they argue that the representations of both researcher and producer are ―constructions‖ (Mayer, Banks & Caldwell 2009: 5), I should stress that this case study is not presented as an excavation or uncovering of knowledge or fact about the production of children‘s PSB at BBC Scotland. Rather, it is a constructivist account in which my own research agenda shaped each stage of the design, execution and writing up of the project and the ‗knowledge‘ that it constitutes. Of itself this constructivist approach may be considered a
methodological principle, as Schwandt argues that
constructivism means that human beings do not find or discover knowledge so much as construct or make it. We invent concepts, models and schemes to make sense of experience, and further, we continually test and modify these constructions in the light of new experience. (Schwandt 1994: 118)
A further facet of the constructivist approach that Schwandt proposes, and which I think is important to stress as regards my own project, is that the constructivist research process is more circular than linear: the structured and rational account of my methodology choices and research design processes that I present here perhaps belies this sometimes frustrating and haphazard aspect of production study.
Before discussing the four main methodologies used in this research it is necessary to explain something of the origins of the project itself as this impacted on the overall research design. Following this I will then give a brief overview of the fieldwork. Just as I indicated in my thesis introduction that my research questions were not entirely my own but were governed by the parameters of the prescribed AHRC research objectives for the project, so too were certain observational
fieldwork methodologies implicit in the way the approved collaborative project had been set up.
Project Background
Dr Karen Lury designed the original proposal for this PhD studentship in
collaboration with Simon Parsons, Head of BBC Scotland Children‘s Department.
The proposal was accepted for funding by the AHRC under their then relatively new
‗collaborative doctoral award‘ programme, which, according to the literature of the time, is
intended to encourage and develop collaboration between Higher Education Institution (HEI) departments and non-academic bodies [and] encourage and establish links that can have benefits for both collaborating partners, providing access to resources and materials, knowledge and expertise that may not
otherwise have been available. (AHRC 2007)
This iteration of the prime benefit of the collaboration being one of access to that which ―may not otherwise‖ be available would suggest that exploitation of access to the non-academic institution is an a priori condition of the award, therefore
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necessitating research methodologies that serve not only the demands of a PhD but which also make that ‗significant contribution‘ contingent on data acquired through access to the collaborating institution. As my project was approved as an ―inside-out production study‖ of the Children‘s Department at BBC Scotland,3 it was clear to me that ethnographic practices must form a key part of that production study. In this sense, in taking up the award, I inherited a pre-approved ethnographic research design framework but within which I selected my own specific questions (outlined in the thesis introduction) and appropriate fieldwork methodologies.
I would say that the privileging of access to BBC Scotland explicit in the project brief impacted not only on my research execution (i.e. the data gathering envisioned by the AHRC to be the key aspect of the access) but also on my research design, in that my specific research questions and methodologies grew organically out of the access afforded to me by the collaborating institution. Access determined not only what data I gathered but what data I wanted or could gather, and to what end. I believe that this reactive approach, although daunting (one doesn‘t know what one is going to find until one has found it), was key to creating my own specific research project from the original brief, and to making the best use of the access at design and execution stages. As Silverman observes, ―most research is generated by a series of chance circumstances relating to the particular investigator and to the economic, social and political context in which (s)he works‖ (1985: 4). Silverman‘s acknowledgement of ―chance circumstances‖ would seem to validate this reactive style of research which continues to change and respond to the circumstances as they present themselves, in what Kemmis and McTaggart call ―the enquiry cycle‖
(2003: 381) of planning, executing, reflecting and replanning in a continual and circular process which we can ally with a constructivist approach. In this way, both
3 2007 Advertised AHRC Project Brief: Glasgow University/BBC Scotland Collaborative Doctoral Award.
ethnography and constructivism can be seen as foundational principles governing my research design and methodology choices.
I will now give a brief overview of my fieldwork structure and timescale before going on to discuss and evaluate my four main methodology choices of desk research; participant observation; interview; and textual analysis.
Fieldwork Overview and Timeframe
This project formally commenced in October 2007 and was funded until September 2010. During the first period of fieldwork (February to August 2008), I was present in the BBC Scotland Children‘s Department on average two days per week. During this first intensive research period I was mainly engaged in participant observation both within the physical department itself (at Pacific Quay) and in various field trips, location and production visits, including two visits to BBC Children‘s events in London and several industry conferences. This concentrated period was followed by a less structured period from September 2008 to January 2009 where I maintained mainly email contact with departmental staff and visited the Department
approximately once a fortnight as a means of accessing specific resources, keeping abreast of the Department‘s production schedules, and of keeping my face familiar.
February 2009 to July 2009 constituted the second of my concentrated fieldwork periods, in which I attended the Department on average three days per week, and it was during this second period that I conducted the bulk of my in-depth research interviews with production personnel, as well as continuing participant observation. This was the final phase of my formal fieldwork, although sporadic contact with the Department was maintained from August 2009 to May 2011 in order to keep the collaborating partners abreast of the progress and completion of this thesis.
I will now discuss the main research methods used in this project.
Desk Research
The starting point for this research was a concentrated period of desk research in which I engaged with the literature in the field. It should be stressed however that desk research remained on-going throughout the entire process of the project, and that some of my BBC fieldwork can be characterised as desk research within the field
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location. As indicated in my literature review, much of the literature of my desk research was based within academia, but also included various government policy documents such as the (massive) 2007 Ofcom Report. The public reception of this report, indicated in both the quality and tabloid press, generated an additional non-academic literature which is relevant to my enquiry of the term ‗crisis‘ in children‘s PSB, as discussed in the next chapter.
Another aspect of my period of initial desk research prior to entering the BBC was familiarising myself with the ethical dimension of production studies and
ethnographic approaches and planning my approach to the fieldwork at BBC
Scotland Children‘s Department. This included setting up a protocol agreement that would govern the working model of the collaboration. While most of this
preparation is subsumed by the eventual research design and methodologies utilised, and thus pointed to in the literature review under ‗The Study of Cultural
Production‘, it is worthwhile noting that one distinct tranche of my desk research is not immediately apparent from the literature review in Chapter One – that of the study of the media in Scotland and discourses of the national – although this literature is a relevant field for this study.
Much of my preliminary desk research was concentrated on discourses of the national in broadcasting and media in Scotland, and indeed I had anticipated that this would be a key field in which to locate my research, particularly given the currency and vigour of the field during my own central research period, which encompassed the research process and report of the Scottish Broadcasting
Commission (August 2007 to October 2008); the publication of an important and ground-breaking anthology, The Media in Scotland, edited by Neil Blain and David Hutcheson (Spring 2008); and the relocation of BBC Scotland‘s administrative and production HQ from its Queen Margaret Drive site to an all new, purpose-built facility at Glasgow‘s Pacific Quay (Spring 2007). The doctoral research of two of my departmental contemporaries in the Centre for Cultural Policy Research also
confirmed a particular ‗buzz‘ in this research field at that time – Lynne Hibberd‘s examination of Scotland‘s creative industries policy post-devolution (Hibberd 2008), and Rebecca Robinson‘s examination of the newly created National Theatre for
Scotland (Robinson 2009). The somewhat hidden use of this research field in the eventual design and execution of my own project therefore merits some explanation.
The simplest explanation would be to say that the Department‘s unusual position as a producer of solely UK network content meant that a more foregrounded (Scottish)
‗national‘ focus to this study would have been a political contrivance that ignored the reality of the actual research context. However I obliquely explore this conceptual tension - between the national and the network – throughout this thesis. The
effective ‗downsizing‘ of the role that I thought this field would play in my research, reflects, therefore, the reactive stance I took to research design, especially in the early stages, as it was not until my fieldwork access commenced that I could see that a national frame of reference, although vital for one strand of enquiry, was too limiting a field in which to site the research as a whole.
Participant Observation
Having committed to an ethnographic approach to the project, I looked to key works in the field of television production studies which utilised ethnographic research models. As well as looking for guidance as to model and method, I was interested to see what sort of scope or volume of work might be reasonable for a three-year research project (three years being the standard AHRC doctoral research funding period). In consideration of ethnographic models, I compared the approaches contained in the following scholarly works:
Philip Elliot, The Making of A Television Series: A Case Study in the Sociology of Culture (1972);
Tom Burns, The BBC: Public Institution and Private World (1977);
Philip Schlesinger, Putting ‗Reality‘ Together: BBC News (1978);
Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (2004);
Julie Light, Television Channel Identity: The Role of Channels in the Delivery of Public Service Broadcasting in Britain, 1996-2002 (2004);
John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (2008);
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Caitriona Noonan, The Production of Religious Broadcasting: The Case of the BBC (2008); and
Jeanette Steemers, Creating Preschool Television: A Story of Commerce, Creativity and Curriculum (2010).
(It should be noted that while this last work was published in the final year of this project and so instructive mainly during my analysis and ‗writing up‘ stage, the previews of the research which Prof. Steemers presented at various academic and industry conferences in the 2007 to 2010 period also had a bearing on my research approaches at the design and execution stages.)
It is fair to say that my own research model draws on many aspects of the above scholarship but that no individual text suggested a ‗one size fits all‘ model that I could replicate or map onto my own study in its entirety. Indeed each of these models of scholarship is significantly different from the other, depending on the focus and scope of the study and the level of access afforded to the researcher.
Though perhaps risking something of a mish-mash of approaches, it would seem that flexibility is required to hone any model to the individual research context presented to the researcher.
Of these works, all but Light make some use of participant observation in their production study and thus participant observation became the first
ethnographic practice that I considered adopting in my own research. Indeed Elliot (1972) makes participant observation his key methodology, and his Appendix B, which outlines his research method, provides a robust defence of participant observation as a prime rather than subsidiary methodology in his own particular research circumstance, though he suggests in his introduction that participant observation is ―not so much a single method as a battery of methods‖ (7). I find Elliot‘s work instructive, particularly in the way that he was unselective in what he recorded or treated as relevant throughout the initial observation period, and in his assertion of the suitability of this method for ―enabling a wide range of research questions and interests to be handled continuously‖ (7). What particularly appealed to me about Elliot‘s model of participant observation is that it would seem to lend
itself to open-ended research and to full exploitation of the specific research context in the initial stages of design. As Elliot argues:
A specific technique would have required an initial decision on the precise focus of the research. This is not to say that the research had no focus at start, but rather from the outset that there was a continual interaction between theoretical assumptions and interests, general and specific hypotheses and the data of the specific case. (7-8)
This reactive flexibility was adopted in my own fieldwork. Another aspect I found inspirational was Elliot‘s commitment to recording everything that he could in his research journal without imposing a critical agenda in the early stages – this approach was adopted throughout the journals of my first concentrated research period, where I sought to describe incidents and circumstances without a conscious filtering of what meaning, relevance or connection might later emerge in analysis.
Where I differ from Elliot is that my desired status as a participant observer was decidedly more participative than Elliot‘s status as a ―passive observer‖ (172-173). I consciously chose to act, where I could, as an extra pair of hands within the Department so as not merely to observe but to experience the working practices of the Department, and so as not to ‗scare off‘‘ members of the Department by my presence or motive. I had previously been advised that ―wandering around with a clip board but not contributing might make folks wary that you are doing some sort of time and motion survey‖ (Simon Parsons, Field journal, July 2007). This approach had its drawback in that I ended up more interested and invested in those areas where I could naturally play a more participative role (such as in development, pitching, casting, scripting and research) and less involved in those areas where I did not have the necessary skills and knowledge to be more than a passive observer. This admission, which partly accounts for the skew of my research towards the
development stages of programme production, also acknowledges a central concern of participant observation: how to become ‗naturalised‘ within the research
environment without losing critical objectivity, or, as Elliot suggests, how to reach
―the stage, known in the literature as ‗going native‘, in which [one begins] to
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recognize beliefs and actions so clearly that it was hard to imagine how they could be different‖ (174).
On this topic, Born writes at length in her nearly decade-long ethnographic study of the BBC, Uncertain Vision (2004), and she would seem to propose no limits to the desired naturalization or immersion of the researcher at the fieldwork stage:
Whatever the setting, the aim of the anthropologist is to become immersed in the everyday culture, language and thought of the natives, so as to become sensitive to unspoken assumptions and implicit forms of knowledge and belief.
(14)
The task of the anthropologist is to experience the culture from within. (16) For Born then, as for Elliot, the greater the proximity to the research subject the better at the participant observation stage – such proximity is contingent on access as well as the researcher‘s skill. It is at a later, reflective stage, that objective analysis and distance become important and description is replaced by analysis and critical connection. Schlesinger too advocates such a model of immersion followed by distance:
As a sociologist I was trying to grasp how the world looks from the point of view of those being studied. The amount of access permitted by the BBC afforded a genuine opportunity for immersion [. . .] to arrive at a sociological analysis, however, one must go beyond immersion. One must become
disengaged and reconstruct the data gathered in terms of a number of themes.
(1978: 11)
Building on these approaches therefore, I sought a particularly ‗participant‘ model of observation in which I became immersed in the culture of the Department before retreating to a more isolated analysis mode: this is why my fieldwork was scheduled to fall within the first two years of this project with only very limited contact in the evaluative, analysis and writing up stages in which I then revisited my field journals.
Distance too was built in between my two central fieldwork blocks of February to August 2008, and February to July 2009; this distance aided the more careful framing of my research questions and a narrower research focus during the second main
fieldwork period, in which I also conducted in-depth interviews. My participant observation comprised of attending meetings, departmental and BBC events and training as relevant to the Children‘s Department at BBC Scotland (including external representation of the Department), and most particularly the shadowing of Children‘s personnel in their daily production duties.
Where my research model clearly differs from that of Elliot is that I used participant observation in association with interview. This mixed methodology
Where my research model clearly differs from that of Elliot is that I used participant observation in association with interview. This mixed methodology