Methods for Audience Study

Three common ethnographic methods that are commonly employed in the field of cultural anthropology are used to collect data from the human participants in this thesis: survey-questionnaires, interviews and participant observation. I believe the audience-centred theories of the ethnography of speaking are crucial for this kind of research which takes the audience’s attitudes and opinions about these kinds of songs into consideration. In addition, there is an important reason for using multiple methods of data collection within this audience study and within this case study:

[A]ny finding or conclusion in a case study is likely to be much more convincing and accurate if it is based on several different sources of information, following a corroboratory mode. (Yin, 1989, p. 97)

The participants that the data is collected is on are individuals residing or studying in Shanghai, between the ages of 18 and early 30s. While this age group does not fit exactly the standard definition of youth, as stated by Bennett (2001) as ‘typically 15 to 25 year olds’ (p. 152) , I believed that the English background of this older group would be stronger and as students they would be very sensitive to new things, such as changes in the pop music scene.97 For practical reasons, I also judged it would be easier for me to do field research on the age group in this thesis, as university students tend to have considerably more free time than those in senior high school leading up to their exam period.

1) The Ethnography of Speaking

Defined by Hymes (1971), the ethnography of speaking is

…a linguistics that had discovered ethnographic foundations, and an ethnography that had discovered linguistic content, in relation to the knowledge (competence) of the persons whose

communities were studied. (p. 81)

97 _{However, Bennett (2001, p. 152) also states that ‘due to a decreasing number of teenagers in the west and}

high rates of unemployment among the young, the ‘youth market’ increasingly targets the more affluent 25 to 45 years age bracket.’ Although this thesis does not examine Western youth, the references to dance clubs and relationships in CE songs are in a Chinese market more geared to an older age group than they are to adolescents.

The ethnography of speaking is a methodology that arose out of the disciplines of linguistics, social and cultural anthropology, and sociology. Hymes, a social and cultural anthropologist, believed that each of these areas had an important contribution to make to linguistics and that linguistics needed the input of these other disciplines to move forward and deal with language use in the social context. A background to the ethnography of speaking underlies nearly all of my data collection in the field.

2) Participant Observation

Blom and Gumperz’s research in Norway (1972) is one of the most significant of early studies which made use of the methodology of ethnography to

investigate language in social interaction, and specifically, codeswitching involving local dialects.98 Their primary means of collecting information on speech use was not by directly questioning locals, since they needed to see in what contexts the dialects were switched (though direct questioning

supplemented their data), and so they relied instead on an ethnographic

method known as participant observation. Participant observation, which is the most essential means of research in the field of cultural anthropology, is a method which seeks to analyse the behaviour of the target group through evidence gained from observation and through participation in the group. The

great advantage of participant observation is that it allows a researcher access to the target group and is an opportunity to observe behaviour in action, and therefore can provide data and information that self report in questionnaire surveys or interviews cannot provide, as people may think or say they do something but in reality they do something different.

Participant observation is more than just a tool for data collection, since the information gained from it can also aid in analysis of sociocultural aspects pertaining to the target group, as well as help the researcher to understand the significance of his or her data.99 It allows a researcher to get an understanding of attitudes of the target audience towards the songs that are not necessarily shown in a more formal setting such as answering direct questions or filling in survey forms (Milroy, 1987).

Of course, participant observation is not without its problems. Three problems are identified by Yin (1989):

First, the investigator has less ability to work as an external observer and may, at times, have to assume positions or advocacy roles contrary to the interests of good scientific practices. Second, the participant-observer is likely to follow a commonly known phenomenon and become a support of the group or organization being studied, if such support did not already exist. Third, the participant role may simply require too much attention relative to the observer role. (p. 93)

99_{See Dewalt et al. (1998, p. 264).}

The first of these is not that relevant in my thesis research, since I am not collecting data or investigating a situation where this is particularly important. It is possible that I will come to share ideas and opinions shared by those who I collect data from; however, since I am using multiple avenues to explore the thesis topic, I am able to test these by looking at corroborating evidence. I will have to be wary of the third problem and guard against it.

Another characteristic and problem of participant observation is that due to a researcher’s personal characteristics or to their background, ‘the researcher’s presence must, to some extent, change the situation that is being studied’ (Platt, 2004, p. 799). As I am not a native Chinese person, do not dwell in Shanghai permanently, and do not fit into the defined category of ‘youth’ used this thesis, I believe that of course there will be some differences in data from someone who does fit into these categories. However, since I believe that I can communicate relatively well in spoken Chinese enough to respond naturally in a communicative situation with the target group, have an interest in the music enjoyed by this group, and am not relying solely on participant observation for my data, but am also using other means of data collection to corroborate findings, I am confident that this technique will be useful within this thesis research.

One other concern has to do with recording the data from participant

observation, and how they are organised around the time for observation. Platt (ibid., p. 799) says that ‘such arrangements…will depend on the social

situation and the nature of the data sought.’

3) Participant observation in KTV

Participant observation is used in this thesis to examine the attitudes and song selection of the target group in a social setting in the KTV environment, which is popularly known elsewhere as karaoke.100 This setting was chosen as it was an easily observable social setting where interests in music were obvious, but also because KTV performance itself, in terms of song selection, is itself a form of social communication. Ma and Chuang (2002) discovered through research in Taiwan that

…in karaoke, participants create their own singing and talking schedule, and select songs that can stimulate desired meanings. It not only constitutes a context of communication but also can become communication per se. (p. 154)

As Ma and Chuang’s study of the performance of the singers in a KTV situation relied on observation in a natural KTV communicative environment, and as this thesis concerns aspects which makes CE songs popular among

100 _{KTV stands for Karaoke television.}

Shanghai youth, I considered that it was suitable to examine such an

environment in my study. Therefore, following Ma and Chuang (2002), this research uses participant observation in a KTV setting.

While participant observation allowed me to get data that I probably could not have obtained by other formal means, in order to get an accurate and well- rounded set of data it was deemed necessary to employ other methods to triangulate the data, and so strengthen the data obtained from each source. There are other more formal techniques which are also just as important for collecting information from human participants, and which Dewalt et al. (1998, p. 259) identify as essential to social science research, such as the use of interviews and questionnaires.

4) Individual Interviews

I had intended to use focused group interviews, where the interviewer, as only a facilitator of the discussion, is free to record information from a number of individuals in conversational interaction on the topics that he or she introduces (Trotter and Schensul, 1998, pp. 714-715), to further supplement the data collected by the participant observation and questionnaires. However, due to the difficulty of getting groups of young people, many of whom have

to individual interviews, which were relatively easy to organise and easy to implement.

Interviews are often an important component of case studies involving human participants. Yin (1989) says that ‘[m]ost commonly, case study interviews are of an open-ended nature [italics author’s own], in which an investigator can ask key respondents for the facts of a matter as well as for the respondents’ opinion of events.’ (p. 89). The personal, often unstructured data that comes from such interviews can be very useful for exploring a topic, or a

phenomenon, such as the phenomenon explored in this thesis.

There are several limitations with individual, open-ended interviews too. One weakness cited with interviews is ‘becoming overly dependent on a key informant’ (Yin, 1989, p. 89), although Yin states that a good way of resolving this issue is ‘to rely on other sources of evidence to corroborate any insight by such informants and to search for contrary evidence as carefully as possible’ (Yin, ibid.). This is also resolved in this thesis by collecting interviews from a number of research participants. Another weakness identified is that as interviews are ‘verbal reports’, ‘they are subject to the problems of bias, poor recall, and poor or inaccurate articulation’ (Yin, ibid, p.91). So Yin (ibid.) says that ‘a reasonable approach is to corroborate interview data with information from other sources’, an approach followed in this thesis.

5) Survey questionnaires

Because both participant observation and individual interviews are methods more suited to the collection of information from small groups (or solitary individuals), it was necessary to balance these methods with information from a questionnaire survey, which is considered to be a quick and inexpensive way to collect general information on the target audience (Milroy,1987, p. 187). Weller (1998, pp. 374-375) has identified questionnaires as a good method of collecting general information over a larger population.

A survey however, like individual interviews, can be somewhat biased and subjective, and so it is also necessary to corroborate data collected from it with other methods. Yet for the survey in this thesis the data is more of a general demographic nature, and conducted in order to provide additional general data which would relate to the thesis topic.

6) ‘Snowball’ sampling

Hymes (1971) has identified the need to deal with social networks in order to select a relatively consistent group of language users. In order to collect the participants for the surveys, the KTV sessions for participant observation and the interviews, a technique was employed called ‘snowball’ sampling.

ethnographic observation, and consists of asking people to recommend friends who meet the criteria of participants in the research who are willing to

participate in it (Milroy, 2003, p. 32). As I was in Shanghai from the second half of 2009 until early 2010, and taught English at several institutions to help me with living costs, it was possible to collect information from some students and those in their social networks using this technique.