Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 8

However, like a number of other media and cultural studies researchers, I would
wish to qualify my specific use of the term 'ethnography'. Many researchers claim

Figure 1.1 Helping Doris to Garden the Front Verge, 1999

their work constitutes ethnography, even though there are wide discrepancies
between the scope and breadth of the methods employed. For example, some studies
are based on correspondence and questionnaires alone - see Stacey's (1994) work on
cinema audiences; while others have relied upon a far deeper immersion in 'the field'
which involves living in the homes and the communities of subjects for long time-
periods - see Scheper-Hughes's (1982) exposure of farm parents in rural Ireland
who through customary 'psychological violence' managed to 'break' a 'sacrificial
child' who could inherit and manage the farm and care for the parents in old age (see
also Scheper-Hughes's (2000) subsequent reflections on ethnographic methods and
ethics). These kinds of differences, which focus on both the time spent and the level
of intensity that the researcher can achieve with participants, have fuelled debate
in media and cultural studies. For example, the claim that the in-depth, informal
semi-structured interview, which characterised media reception ethnographies by
researchers like Morley (1986), actually constituted genuine ethnographic work,
was attacked by critics for its lack of anthropological long-term immersion in the
field (Gillespie 1995; Nightingale 1993).
Already careful about making the full-blown claim to ethnography, media and
cultural studies researchers have described their work in particular terms. Hermes
(1995), for example, argues that her study of magazine consumption is 'ethnographic