Surveys and Ethnography

In class last week I was thinking about a time when I answered a telephone survey about radio listening when I was at home for the summer at my parent’s house. As was discussed in class, the survey took much longer than they initially said that it would, and was also not explained properly by the person administering the survey. It was about local radio stations, and I had been living away from home for several years – therefore my experience with the local radio stations was from when I was in high school several years before. I think that the answers that I gave definitely skewed the data as I was not answering as an “active/current” listener. This highlights the importance of finding the RIGHT people to answer a survey – maybe the phone book was not their best option in this case.

I was quite interested in the Luker this week, as I’ve always found ethnography to be an interesting method but have never done any ethnographic research of my own. My main exposure to ethnography was studying ethnomusicology in my undergrad. This is ethnographic research about music. Many of the issues that Luker brought up in terms of the balance between being too much of an outsider and too much of an insider come through in ethnomusicology as well. If you are an “outsider” the music that you are researching might not sound at all like what you think music “sounds” like, or it might be involved in a ceremony which you cannot take part in, blocking your access to the data. Alternatively, if you are an “insider,” then your musical expertise will inhibit you from experiencing the music as an average listener would. I think that ethnography is very interesting, but having read this week, it seems to me to be the most complicated and risky method.