Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces

摘要

In her article "Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces" Katarina Eriksson Barajas discusses how to find and approach research participants in public spaces. Eriksson Barajas's study is based on tenets of the empirical study of literature. Reader response and reception theories and discursive psychology are both employed in the analysis. This approach, called discursive reception studies, enables researchers to analyze the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the experience of, in this case, a film or a play. Eriksson Barajas discusses the following methodological issues: 1) how to gain access to "naturally" occurring practices such as when people meet to talk at cafés after seeing a film together and during the intermissions at the theater and 2) how to record data on such practices. The results of Eriksson Barajas's study show that gaining access to participants in cinema settings is difficult, but not impossible.