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 may draw from those interviews are therefore somewhat illegitimate. My excuses must be that at present we have no better data on the treatment of alcoholic patients and that, more generally, I have at least attempted to ground myself as fully as possible in these few observational studies of medical consultations that have so far been undertaken. Whether all this is a sufficient guide to the specific matter of practice with alcoholics must remain an open question for the moment. (1980, pp. 27–8)
I am inclined to agree with Strong’s version. For me, an interview or focus group study that only uses participants’ accounts to understand people’s day-to-day practices seems problematic.
The interview or focus group may be an economical means, in the sense of time and money, of getting access to an ‘issue’. It may also be an economical means of getting access to issues that are not easily available for analysis, to get people to ‘think out loud’ about certain topics. However, having said this, most topics are ‘freely available’ for analysis. As Holstein and Gubrium (1995) note, to understand the topic ‘family’ we do not need to interview people or enter people’s homes. We can see how ‘family’ is organized, produced and negotiated on the bus, in supermarkets, in newspapers, in talk-shows, in legislation, and so on. The point is, whether it is an interview, a focus group, or an observation of an office or supermarket, you should be sensitive that people’s actions and interactions are contextually situated. By contextually situated I simply mean that we massively shape our actions and interactions to ‘fit with’ (and so reproduce) the, often unspoken, norms, rules and expectations of the specific context we find ourselves in. You only have to think of how you behave differently in a church or classroom from in a pub or at a friend’s house, or how you recount the same story in different ways to different friends or different members of your family, to get a sense of what contextually situated might mean. Also, you just know at a glance when someone is behaving ‘oddly’ in a situation; this sense of oddness may in part emerge from their breaching the expectations of what is appropriate conduct for that context.
It is important to note what people mean when they say that they prefer to focus on ‘naturally occurring’ interaction. Some people take it to mean that you should only use data that is not researcher-led or researcher-prompted. With this reading you would not be interested in working with interview or focus group data, but rather only be interested in recording and analyzing occasions that would take place if you were not present. With this line of argument the Holy Grail is to use only video and audio data that is (reasonably) untainted by any researcher’s actions. Short of using hidden cameras or microphones and never being present at the scene, this is an impossible dream. The rise of ubiquitous computing may alter this, as wearable recording devices become more miniaturized and routine features of life. Lifebloggers, people who wear recording devices to capture and distribute all aspects of their unfolding lives are at the forefront of this. However, as numerous studies of interaction have shown, the emergent properties of an encounter are intimately related to a whole range of facets of that scene and this includes the presence of ‘silent witnesses’, like cameras or microphones (see, for example, Speer and Hutchby, 2003).
However, what I take a focus on naturally occurring activity to mean is that you should try to discover how some action or interaction – be it a police interrogation or a qualitative interview – occurs as ‘natural’, normal or routine. So, rather than only asking a focus group moderator about how they run focus groups, you can gain a good understanding of ‘how they run focus groups’ through some form of recordings of them actually running focus groups. Equally, rather than asking counsellors about how they counsel, you may want to base many of your observations on recordings of them actually doing some counselling. From this perspective, researcher-led information – from interviews or other sources – is still of use in trying to describe how counsellors do counselling, or how focus group moderators run focus groups. However, the primary source of data would often be audio or video recordings of what they actually do as they do it. When analyzing both the recordings of counsellors in action and the interviews with them about their specific practice, you would obviously take into account how your actions and any recording equipment impacted on the ongoing encounters.
So the call for naturally occurring interaction in this sense means that, no matter what sources of data you are relying on, your main interest would be generating a sense of how the specific thing you are interested in routinely occurs or ‘comes off’ as it does. As such, researchers interested