Pursuing Ethnographic “Closeness:” A Reflection on Race, Reality Television Audiences, and the Focus Group Encounter

ABSTRACT Using fieldnotes and headnotes from a study I conducted on African American viewers of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta, this article evaluates the ethnographic potential of the focus group for audience studies researchers. In particular, I argue the focus group is a method that allows researchers to pursue “closeness”—a value ethnographers have long celebrated as essential for cultivating emic understandings of people and the lives they live. The article outlines two key strategies for achieving ethnographic “closeness” in focus group encounters – the construction of the focus group as a field site and recognition of the focus group as a point of access to the contexts audiences use to make sense of media texts. If properly executed, I conclude focus groups have the potential to effectively function as “safe spaces,” allowing participants to push back against damaging media representations and define themselves.