This book draws from a four-year PhD project carried in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge and fully funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust from September 2007 to July 2011. Ethnographic research with television audiences, supplemented with interviews and participant observation in three television networks, was conducted intermittently from June 2008 to October 2009, June to July 2010 and December 2010 to January 2011.

This appendix summarizes the project's methodology and presents information about the background and sampling of project participants and the general conduct of fieldwork. The ethnographic approach taken here draws from the tradition of audience ethnographies in media studies and the anthropology of moralities in the attention to lay moralities expressed in ordinary people's media talk about poverty and suffering on television.

Ethnography of Media and Moralities

Ethnography is traditionally defined as the use of participant observation requiring long-term immersion in a particular culture. Hammersley and Atkinson (1995, 1) define it as participating ‘overtly or covertly in people's daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light in the issues that are the focus of research.’

In media studies the use of ethnography is well documented. Within the ‘ethnographic turn’ of media research in the 1980s to 1990s, studies highlighted how media artifacts are appropriated in people's everyday lives and how media messages are differently interpreted by audiences (e.g., Gillespie 1995; Radway 1985). An ethnographic perspective is understood as well suited to examine the ‘double articulation’ of media as texts and as technologies or objects (Silverstone 1994). This holistic approach not only examines processes of reception in investigating specific interpretations of media messages; it also accounts for general processes of consumption in studying what people do with the media in their everyday lives (Morley 2006).

Ethnography is understood to be ideal in studies that employ the framework of mediation in examining the ‘circulation of meaning’ in media and social life (Silverstone 1999, 13). Ethnography is sensitive to different moments that constitute the mediation process, namely media production, media texts, media technologies and the social and cultural context (Madianou 2009).