tracing the history and development of ideas, practices or institutions that we take for granted today, documents about that topic can help you engage with and re-think the research. They are vital resources for any form of research, be it as part of the stages or practices called ‘literature reviews’, ‘background reading’ or ‘producing questions for focus groups’ or as ways to spark new (and old, long forgotten) thoughts about your research. As such, being aware of and engaged with text-based documents is essential to all research practice. The other key source in contemporary research practice is audio- and visual-based sources. It is to these that we now turn.
Audio- and visual-based sources
As with documents, you have a wide and ever-growing variety of potential sources to work with. With document-based research you are working with materials that already exist, often in a published form; your major issue is generally just getting access to them. When working with audio- and visual-based sources some of these materials already exist, like television programmes, whereas with others you have to take some part in generating them, like interviews or videos of interactions.
There are various sources to work with; for example, some people work with recordings of all types of radio and television programmes. A lot of work has been undertaken on news interviews, both radio- and television-based. Heritage and Greatbatch (1991) have used audio and video recordings of the news to understand the interactional work that occurs between the news interviewer and their interviewees. For example, rather than say something like ‘You’re an idiot’, news interviewers routinely say something like ‘Mr Smith says you’re idiot’ or ‘Some people say you’re an idiot’. This is just one of the practices that locally produces the ‘impartiality’ or ‘objectivity’ of news interviewing and so sustains the impartial status of the institution of news interviews. This style of work involves a very detailed focus on the interactional work of the speakers – the form of the talk – and is often less concerned with the specific topic that is actually being talked about on the programme. Williams et al. (2003) take a different approach, where the actual content of the talk was the focus. They were concerned to understand how information about embryonic stem cell research was portrayed throughout the news media. They used recordings of news reporting, focusing on the televised debates, alongside newspaper articles to outline how the ethical arguments of those for and against stem cell research were covered by the media.
Researchers have also analyzed documentaries, focusing on how the programme works to produce its specific account as ‘factual’ and/or ‘objective’, alongside exploring what specific version of the world the documentary outlines. Others have focused on radio talk-shows. Some research has focused more on the content of these phone-in programmes, the specific topics covered or the debates. Others, like Hutchby (1996), focused more on the form of such programmes. He outlined how the hosts of these programmes work to encourage debate: rather than remaining neutral, they routinely take the opposite point of view to the caller and so encourage argumentative talk, as well as sometimes openly agreeing with the caller’s perspective.
Whatever approach has been taken, all these researchers had to generate their own specific archives of materials. Some of them obtained the recordings of specific programmes from another archive that already existed. For example, Williams et al. (2003) had access to an archive that contained all the main TV bulletins and UK national newspaper articles that focused on human genetics research in the year 2000. In this case, someone had already collected all the relevant (national) material for them and so their analysis was based on a subsample of that archive. All they had to do was search through that archive to find all the materials that referred to stem cell research. In general, you will rarely be that fortunate. Such comprehensive archives may not exist for your specific topic area. However, in saying that, it is always worth checking out if any do exist. They may be held by specific academics, academic departments or specialized libraries.
More routinely, you will have to start from scratch and actually discover and record your own material. Recording, then, can often be relatively easy, as all you need is a source, be it television, radio or computer and a suitable recording device. Many TV and radio programmes are now archived on the web, so you may be able to download them from there. You may also find that the audiovisual department of a university (with enough notice and appropriate paperwork) has the facilities to record programmes for you. You could always try and contact the radio or television company that originally broadcast the programme; they may, if you explain your research interest, provide you with a copy. Whatever you do, please be aware of how copyright law works in your country. If you want to reproduce a still image from a television programme in a journal article, it is more than likely that you will have to seek the permission of the owner of the copyright of that image. That may mean contacting the company that broadcast the programme or the actual production company.
As with document-based materials, you could also focus on fictional radio and television programmes, be they soap operas, drama serials, plays or films. Again, albeit often under the title of cultural studies, a huge body of work focuses on how specific themes or ideas are explored and portrayed in fictional media. For example, next time you watch a romantic comedy, think about how certain versions of gender are situated, sustained and (occasionally) subverted and how they routinely produce heterosexual relationships as the only form of relationship. Similarly, how do science fiction series like Star Trek offer a specific moral and ethical version of the human practice? How are the debates around the role of biotechnology echoed and explored in these series? Television and radio programmes offer us access to a wealth of potentially researchable materials as they offer access to materials that focus on, describe and render (nearly) all activities and forms of life.
Other researchers work with recordings of interviews and focus groups (see Barbour, 2018; Brinkmann and Kvale, 2018). Routinely, discursive work on these types of data has focused more on the content of the talk. For example, Edley and Wetherell (1997) used interviews with small groups of teenage boys to focus on how they talked about their own gender identities. They noted how their interviewees produced plural and often conflicting versions of masculinity, how they worked to distance themselves from being understood as ‘macho men’ or ‘wimps’. They sought to produce themselves as ‘new men’, but in so doing, this new identity was still based on the values of ‘machoness’.
The call for ‘naturally occurring’ data
Schegloff (1999) offers the following story about an aphasiologist (someone who deals with speech disorders caused by dysfunction of the language areas of the brain):
[W]hile engaged in testing aphasic patients, he would ordinarily use rest periods during which patients had a coffee to go and check his mail, etc. One day he happened to join the patients in the coffee room during the break and was astonished to hear the patients doing things while talking amongst themselves or with relatives which they had just shown themselves to be ‘unable’ to do in the preceding test session. (1999, p. 431)
This story nicely demonstrates the potential benefits of a focus on what people do in the context of their everyday lives. By using audio and video recordings and observations of ‘naturally occurring’ interactions over interviews, or experiments, or imagining you already know, you can gain a different perspective on people’s actions and interactions.
Recently, there has been a turn away from relying solely on interview- or focus-group-based data. The problem for some researchers is that with this type of data you are relying solely on participants’ self-reports or accounts of what they do. As Strong (1980) notes, just prior to his insightful analysis of interviews with doctors about their treatment of alcoholic patients:
One further aside. No form of interview study, however devious or informal, can stand as an adequate substitute for observational data. The inferences about actual practice that I or others
