A Critical Review of Theresa
Belton’s ‘The ‘Face at the Window Study’: a fresh
approach to media influence and to investigating the influence of television
and videos on children’s imagination’
Jane Anthony
Teresa Belton’s ‘Face at the Window’ study sets out to investigate the concept of ‘influence’ through the creative writing and oral narratives of Year 6 students. Her declared intention is to develop a more sensitive notion of ‘influence’ through a study of the extent to which children made use of their screen-viewing in their storymaking.
In the first phase of her research she collected about three hundred stories from students across a range of schools. From this first phase Belton selected thirty-six children whose work she felt ‘seemed screen-derived of screen-dependent’ for further study in the second phase of her research. In this second phase Belton collected further stories from her subjects but to this data she added semi-structured interviews in which students were given a set of oral exercises and were asked about their creative writing and personal lives in general.
Her data analysis involves identifying the ways in which screen-viewing was consciously and unconsciously used in the children’s writing with recourse to five students in particular. Her conclusions reiterate her methodology as appropriate to the elusive, affective nature of her research project in that it allows her to respond to calls for a more ‘naturalistic enquiry into media influence’ (Belton 2000 p.640)
Belton foregrounds the issue of research methodology, particularly within education, as the theoretical field in which she is working. She defines her problematic immediately by identifying a critical inadequacy in previous research into media influence.
The article itself recontextualizes
this problematic in a number of increasingly specialized stages. Initially, Belton achieves this by
identifying the limitations of direct quantitative research and proposing the
need for a ‘paradigm shift’ in research practices.
The problematic assumes a more
specialized form, however, when she positions her own work more explicitly
within the field of research into media influence. Belton offers a critique of direct research methods arguing
that they fail to address an epistemological paradox inevitable in any dealings
with the explicit discussion of the unconscious mind. Ultimately her findings are themselves recontextualized
within the wider ambit of cultural studies when she demonstrates how her
account has responded to calls from other ethnographical researchers for a
research method which attends to affect as well as cognition.
This critique is intended to demonstrate how Belton’s readiness to dispense with the direct forms of data collection in favour of ‘new, more oblique methodologies’ (Belton 2000 p.629) leads her research to founder on its inability to produce adequately theorised generalizations. In first defining her research position I will show how her research project is problematized from the outset by reductive notions of quantitative research and how these are brought to bear on an only partially theorized use of direct research methods to validate her indirect, qualitative data. Her reluctance to adopt any coding principles, I will suggest, is a central weakness to her methodology.
A substantial section of my argument concentrates on Belton’s analysis of her data and the argument she produces to justify her lack of generalizations. My critique will interrogate Belton’s unself-conscious assumptions about the parity of directly and indirectly obtained data in her analysis paying particular regard to the selection and representation of her research subjects. I will also offer a critical view of her incipient psychologizing of her research subjects. In conclusion, I will examine the extent to which Belton can justify her lack of generalization as a response to calls from other ethnographers for greater specificity in research methodology with a view to showing how her descent into individualism makes meaningful generalizations impossible.
Belton inserts herself into the
ongoing debate between the two epistemological loci of quantitative and
qualitative research. However, her
comments on both approaches, in fact, reveal assumptions about the immanence of
an ultimate truth which arguably pay little respect to the inherently
phenomenological thrust of qualitative research. She does not engage with debates within the field of
qualitative research itself between, for example, positivist and constructivist
views of research subjects and their version of social reality.
Belton is quite correct when she argues how direct research can only be a blunt instrument in dealing with the unconscious or with memory (Belton 2000 pp.632-3). However, she enunciates her own research position in terms which imply that the unconscious and its processes are indeed ultimately accessible if she can only find the right research tools. She is thus making the key assumption that research begets transparency, a position which many qualitative researchers would fiercely question.
The terms in which she couches her critique of interviews bears this view out.
Verbal reports can be incomplete, and even if people are aware of their cognitive processes, reporting them might distort them; in addition, confusion may arise after the event, and having to answer questions about processes not normally attended to may result in misrepresentation. (Belton 2000 p.632)
If reports are to be deemed ‘incomplete’, then this presupposes that there could exist a complete report. This view stands in stark contrast to that of the constructivist researcher personified by Denzin & Lincoln (2000) as self-conscious ‘researcher-as-bricoleur’ who ‘works between and within competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigms’ (Denzin & Lincoln 2000 p.6). Although Belton’s ‘multi-pronged approach to data gathering’ (Belton 2000 p.633) contains echoes of the bricoleur, words such as ‘distort’ or ‘misrepresentation’ adumbrate the existence of a true representation of such processes whose essential ‘trustworthiness’ would not ultimately be open to question.
This orientating of her research in relation to the qualitative research tradition is, at this point, the furthest extent to which she theorizes her research project. It is a sine qua non of most qualitative research (see Bryman 1988 p.67) that the theoretical framework grows out of empirical observation in order that the researcher can engage in the terms most congruent with the social realities experienced by their research subjects. For this reason an inductive approach to theoretical generalization is most likely by which hypotheses are formed on the basis of empirical observation and modified accordingly in the light of any empirical divergences or anomalies. If the researcher is to retain the ‘contextualist emphasis’ (Bryman 1988 p.68) of qualitative research, the inductive process might lead to a complete reformulation of the research question if the terms of the original question are deemed irrelevant to the empirical setting.
Stories on a shared theme produced by three-hundred Year 6 pupils provided the empirical setting within the wider empirical fields of children’s imaginative writing, their screen viewing and their domestic circumstances. However, a notable feature of Belton’s research and approach to data analysis is that her ultimate generalizations are not so much about the empirical setting as they are about the research methodology operationalized within that setting.
The empirical setting was further
localized in the second of her two phases of research. Initially the setting was constituted
by the totality of year 6 pupils across five schools. These schools were said to provide a representative sample
of children across the ‘whole social and educational range’ (Belton
2000 p.633). Phase Two was only
implemented once Belton had carried out an analysis of the first phase data,
which she defined as ‘more or less (Belton 2000 p.634) quantitative,
collected in the form of three-hundred stories entitled ‘The Face at the
Window’.
Belton coded these stories either
‘screen-derived or screen-dependent’ (Belton 2000 p.633); this was
used as the means of selecting the second, more localized, quota sample of just
thirty-six children for the second phase of the research. This sample comprised equal numbers of
students chosen on the basis that their stories were representative of the two
categories of ‘screen-derived’ and ‘screen-dependent’
writing.
Belton claims that data collected during this second phase of research provided the testing ground for the effectiveness of her indirect research methodology. Her dealings with her research subjects in this second phase were exploratory in nature, demonstrating an avowed commitment to ‘an oblique and wide-ranging stance to data-gathering’ (Belton 2000 p.634) which includes further imaginative writings, semi-structured interviews, oral activities and headteacher comments.
It may seem ironic in view of her critique of direct research methods outlined above that Belton is prepared to use direct methods as a form of strategic verification of her indirectly gathered data. Brown & Dowling (1998), for instance, argue for the efficacy of a research model in which qualitative and quantitative methods are related dialogically to one another. However, it is the premise on which Belton justifies her use of direct methods which demands interrogation. This particular debate centres on her co-option of triangulation as a method by which she can validate her more ‘provisional’, indirect conclusions. Having challenged the validity of interviewing in eliciting truths about unconscious processes, Belton, nevertheless, makes use of semi-structured interviews as a secondary method for collecting data.
The talking acted both as a complement to what could
be learnt from reading the stories, and as a form of triangulation that might
confirm or refute my provisional conclusions. (Belton 2000 p.633)
Belton begins her data analysis by
asserting that ‘the usefulness of any methodology can only be judged by
what it enables the researcher to find out’ (Belton 2000 p.634).
Despite the self-evident character
of this statement, her data analysis exposes considerable problems in producing
valid generalizations. However,
she turns this to her advantage since it is precisely this issue of
generalization which she wishes to take issue with and for which reason she
claims the status of a ‘new paradigm’ for her methodology.
Belton gathers her data using both
direct and indirect methods. She
clearly demarcates her direct data as ‘secondary to, contingent upon the
primary data’ (Belton 2000 p. 633) of the children’s stories even
though it is collected precisely in order to make sense of, or even to confer
authority on, the indirectly gathered data. The relationality of these two forms of data is not subject
to doubt or question despite the fact that they are of two distinct orders of
signification. A consideration of
her analysis will reveal the intractable nature of this problem, a problem
which Belton does not address.
The four pages of Belton’s
data analysis focus predominantly on five of the thirty-six research
subjects. In analysing her
subjects she makes reference to several different types of data all of which
she implicitly considers correlational despite the fact that the testimonies
are offered under varying conditions and require different modes of
interpretation. For example, her
first subject (first in terms of the written account) is Mel who offers an
‘explanation’ of a picture which Belton has shown him. Belton’s initial
interpretative framework is constituted around Mel’s own references to
his parents which Belton implicitly regards as transparent. She treats the headteacher’s
corroborations in a similar way although she fails to make explicit the
conditions in which she elicited such apparently anecdotal evidence.
These accounts of Mel’s
domestic setting are accepted at face value and enable Belton to make the
assumption that she has ‘[learned] something of Mel’s life’
(Belton 2000 p.635) notwithstanding the fact that narratives work
metaphorically as well as metonymically.
Belton’s analysis of Mel’s storymaking ignores the different
orders of social reality constituted by his fictional stories, his supposedly autobiographical
narratives and the headteacher’s testimony. The reductive thrust of such an approach is borne out in
Belton’s surprising invocation of the ‘uses and
gratifications’ theory of audience reception, a reference which threatens
to make ultimate recourse to psychological functionalism. The media is implicitly characterised
as a ‘repertoire’ for Mel ‘to draw on’ (Belton 2000
p.635) which compensates for his emotionally deprived family
circumstances. Similarly,
Chris’s use of screen influence is also interpreted in respect of his
‘psychological need’ (Belton 2000 p.638). The
‘something’ that Belton has, in fact, learned is not explicitly
coded although out of her analysis emerges a pronounced, though rather
homespun, tendency to psychologize each child’s ‘use’ of
their screen viewing in their writing.
For example, Mel’s narrative ‘used screen content as a
vehicle for expressing feelings’ (Belton 2000 p.636) while ‘perhaps
Antonia identified (presumably unconsciously) with the abandoned soldier’
(Belton 2000 p.636).
At
this point we need to pay heed to the issues of representation which inevitably
emerge in the course of any analytical account and of which Belton seems
peculiarly oblivious. Mel is
quoted at length in a way that reveals his low levels of articulation; Belton
makes a number of allusions to his
‘emotional’ experience, he is described in pitying terms as
‘poor Mel’ whose ‘viewing was almost entirely of a violent
and uncongenial nature' (Belton 2000 p.635). Antonia, on the other hand, is presented as ‘an able,
thoughtful girl’ whose ‘written stories were accomplished literary
pieces, each a different, tragic tale of loss and abandonment’ (Belton
2000 p.636) but is never quoted directly.
Coffey & Atkinson claim that ‘The decisions we make about representation essentially are part of the analyses we undertake’ (Coffey & Atkinson 1996 p.23). It is not clear that Belton has self-consciously made such decisions. Her language has a sporadically emotive force which arguably compromises any claims she might make about the subjects of her research. Furthermore, though her epithets and lyrical descriptions resonate forcefully within her account it is never made quite clear to whether they constitute coded variables. This lack of explicitness begs the question to what extent we can say that her account fulfils the criteria for elaborated description (Brown & Dowling 1998 p.83).
The relationship between analysis
and representation is given a particular twist in Belton’s final
comparative analysis of Mel and Antonia’s storymaking.
Mel’s
‘Face at the Window’ used screen content as a vehicle for
expressing feelings, whereas Antonia exploited an idea from a film for
mechanical purposes. (Belton 2000 p.636)
In making use of words such as
‘used’, ‘vehicle for expressing’,
‘exploited’ and ‘mechanical purposes’, Belton’s
account confers on both children and their stories an agency with regard to the
media. If she were truly to
privilege indirect forms of research that were sensitive to unconscious processes,
she could not theoretically justify such representational decisions.
Her research is complicated by other
problems. Because her concept
indicator of ‘influence’ is one that according to her definition
cannot be articulated, her indicator variables are concomitantly slippery and
difficult to define. Furthermore,
her account reveals an increasing tendency to err into the realm of psychology
despite the fact that the problem is not initially articulated in these
terms. Ultimately the specificity
of her findings, which she considers the innovatory strength of her research,
precipitates a descent into individualism which precludes any further
generalizations.
The narrative mode of her account of
the data is clearly motivated not only by the desire to capture the diversity
and distinctiveness of the children’s identities and responses but also
to forestall any ‘premature closure’ (Bryman 1988 p.81) of the data
analysis - a recurrent concern of qualitative researchers. This resistance to ‘premature closure’
is arguably used, however, as a pretext for her general unwillingness to
apprentice the reader ‘into the researcher’s principles of
recognition of his indicators’ (Brown and Dowling 1998, p.91). While it is understood that she wishes
to eschew a rigid theoretical framework that would ‘constrain’ and
‘blind’ her ‘to the views of the participants but also
unanticipated facets of a strand of social reality’ (Bryman 1988 p.87),
Belton arguably never closes the ‘discursive gap’ (Brown and
Dowling 1998 p. 97) between ‘substantive theory’ and ‘formal
theory’ (Bryman 1988 p.87).
Although Belton begins her account
by situating her study within a clearly defined theoretical framework regarding
the concept of influence, she is ultimately reluctant to generalize from her
findings, ‘each of the 36 children appeared to me to be unique and
therefore resistant to generalization, with respect to the influence of the
screen on their storymaking’ (Belton 2000 p.639). One might question the point of research
that ultimately only describes, or at the very most, offers explanations for
specific instances, in this case, of media influence on children’s
writing. Her vocabulary choices of
‘unique’ and ‘resistant’ suggest both a romanticising
tendency in her representation of the children the affective force of which
flies in the face of ‘formal theory’ and a methodological failure
to establish the ‘integrity of the concept-indicator links’ (Brown
& Dowling 1998 p.101).
Belton exploits the
‘unique’ and ‘resistant’ qualities of her research
subjects, however, as a rhetorical side-step into a ‘new form of
generalization’ (the title of this section of her account). In the subordinate clause which
opens this section of her account, Belton retreats from the theoretical field
of media influence towards a consideration of the relationship between the
children’s creativity and the emotional environment fostered (or not) in
their homes. Her generalization,
presented in terms of the hypothetical phenomenon of ‘psycho-cultural
ecology’ (Belton 2000 p.639), therefore, bears only a tangential relation
to the research problem enunciated at the beginning of the account.
The mechanism for
effecting this shift from the analysis of media influence to the hypothesising
of a 'psycho-cultural ecology' resides arguably in Belton’s commitment to an ‘indirect’
methodology.
One
pattern that my approach did lead me to discern was that in many cases children
who, though they watched a significant amount of television and videos. As most
children do, but used it little in their story making, were those whose parents
appeared to communicate with them most. (Belton 2000 p.639)
While
she is justified in taking issue with research techniques which access only
conscious opinions or feelings, the analysis of data and the consequent absence
of generalizations relating to the initial research problem reveal how
impoverished Belton’s theory of the unconscious actually is. This is problematic since, as I have
indicated above, she makes so many tacit assumptions about the emotional inner
lives of the children and the needs that are satisfied by their screen viewing
and creative writing.
Ultimately,
she has to admit to having no conclusion to offer at all but, arguing in terms
of her methodology, she construes this as a strength, and not a weakness, of
her research. Even the
generalization regarding children ‘whose parents appeared to communicate
with them most’ is undermined by her final disavowal of any reliable
conclusions. With her musings on
children from disadvantaged backgrounds making productive use of personal
experience in their writing as opposed to nurtured children proving to be
lacking in creativity, Belton’s conclusions take on a decidedly
common-sense slant which throws not only the validity, but the very usefulness,
of her research into question. Her
‘non-prescriptive concept of the mechanism of
‘influence’’(Belton 2000 p.640) precludes the systematic coding
her indicator variables to the extent that she cannot generalize within the
framework she has established.
Moreover, the authority of the ‘new’ and
‘embedded’
‘apprehensions’ (Belton 2000 p.640) which she claims are
afforded her by this methodology is radically undermined by very fact that this
methodology can offer nothing more
than such ‘apprehensions’.
Claims
for an ‘indirect and broad’ methodology
Belton relocates her study within a number of fields:
cultural studies, psychology and sociology. She reaffirms the validity of her methodology as a timely
response to a number of calls from a range of theorists for a shift from a
theoretical emphasis on categorization to one on particularization. She reiterates her rejection of
decontextualized, experimental research, figured as ‘the distorting
confines of the laboratory’ (Belton 2000 p.640), stressing in its place
the need for a methodology which has its origins in ‘everyday
experience’ (Belton 2000 p.640).
She justifies the inconclusiveness of her findings by establishing
herself as part of a wider theoretical consensus regarding the need for an
investigative approach which engages with the complexities, the banalities, and
the openness of the experience of viewing television within the domestic
context.
Belton
has again enacted a subtle shift of emphasis insofar as she is suggesting that
her study of media ‘influence’ is simply a heuristic device by
which she can demonstrate the effectiveness of her methodology and that the
usefulness of this methodology can be generalized into further research. Under the banner of methodological
innovation, she can feel free to cite cultural studies theorists alongside
psychologists and sociologists.
However, this yoking of
disparate disciplines returns us to the central weakness of her study –
the extent to which she offers (or does not offer) an explicit theory of the
unconscious and as a consequence of this the extent to which she moves
unreflexively between different theoretical fields. In drawing methodological parallels between these fields,
she translates the ethnographer’s preoccupation with the specificities of
individuals’ television viewing habits, and the sense they make of this,
into the psychologist’s commitment to addressing ‘human
individuality’ (J.A. Smith et al 1995 cited by Belton 2000 p.641) and the
sociologist’s interest in subjects’ ‘narrated lives’
(p.641). But such translations are
untenable since each theoretical field constructs a different notion of the
viewing subject and their social reality.
Belton’s reference to Laurel Richardson bears particular witness
to Belton’s cosmetic engagement with ethnographical enquiry.
Richardson’s constructivist perspective, is embodied, for example, in her
rejection of the concept of triangulation as essentialist and in its place
posits her own concept of ‘crystallization’ whereby ‘what we
see depends on our angle of repose’ (Richardson pp.923-948 in Denzin
& Lincoln 2000 p.934). This is
clearly at odds with Belton’s tendency towards ‘holistic’
(Belton 2000 p.641) approaches.
My
intention has been to indicate some of the ways in which Belton’s
investigation is only partially theorized. Belton’s clarion-call for new approaches to
ethnographical enquiry are well-grounded insofar as they reflect a wider trend
away from the categorical to the particular but they do not constitute in
themselves a justification for the claims she makes with respect to her own
study. In her closing statements
she claims that this study has
suggested how qualitative research can lead to a
non-quantitative yet valid type of pattern-making which may help us to develop
more subtle but equally useful forms of understanding.
This assertion is problematic for a number of
reasons. The only pattern she was
able to identify was with regards to the writing of children from nurturing
homes but even this was subsequently qualified as provisional. In fact her earlier claim to ‘new
apprehensions’ stands at odds with her final claims since
‘pattern-making’ implies an operational model which the study
patently does not provide.
My analysis of Belton’s data collection and
analysis also focused on her selection and representation of her research
subjects in the construction of her central argument about her
methodology. Brown and Dowling
argue that the validity of a study depends in part to how far the problem
relates ‘directly to the system about which claims are to be made’
(Brown & Dowling 1998 p.101).
Belton’s account cannot satisfy this criterion since she is
reluctant to theorize about her key concept indicator of media
‘influence’. In this way she attempts to defend her tendency to
psychologize her subjects.
I have demonstrated how Belton’s study stands
as a useful reminder both of the problems of theorizing about the particular
and the pitfalls of eschewing any form of coding principles. Although her methodology is more
theorized, however, the validity of her methodology cannot provide an alibi for
the study’s failure to produce any generalizations regarding media
‘influence’, even if Belton does attempt to recast this aspect of
her account as a ‘new form of generalization’. Ultimately her new
‘paradigm’ for ethnographic research does not offer a convincing
enough refutation of the need for a dialogical method of research which gives
equal weight to the theoretical and the empirical.
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Morley, D. (1992) Television,
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Silverman, DF. (ed) (1997) Qualitative
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