Ethnographic Research Paper

In this research paper, Paul Booth and Peter Kelly carried out an ethnographic research on fans. Specifically they discussed the change that the advent of new digital technology brought to the world of fandom and to the shifting identity of fans. Their aim is to establish that despite the advent of new technologies fandom has not entirely changed its meaning but has expanded itself. This article has been published by an online Journal called “Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies” which main aim is to strengthen the fields of audience and reception studies and as many other articles on it, Booth’s and Kelly’s work encourages an open debate not only with media scholars but also with the subjects of the research itself. In fact, the researchers took in consideration the voices of 115 people at the Chicago Tardis convention for fans of Doctor Who and gave them the opportunity of questioning their own ideas about their identities as fans. Even though some of its elements do not perfectly match the conception of fan in 2016 and some of its point could have been analyzed more in depth, this research still gives a good explanation
In fact, it carries out an ethnographic observation connecting it with interviews. Even though the observation method might be useful in order to understand the phenomena from a personal point of view, the problem with it is that the researchers might get too involved with the sample group studied and miss important aspects of the study. This could be the case of the lead researcher who himself was a fan of Doctor Who and had attended the convention before. As he was familiar with the context when it came to interview the other fans or observe their behavior he might have lost the focus of the real purpose of the research and his subjective point of view might have affected the results of the