Media appraisal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Media appraisal - Essay Example By combing these methods the author has an original approach to her research and this makes it very interesting to criticise. The paper shows how the role of popular music in society has been studied traditionally and challenges some classical methodologies while also proposing new ones. It is the combination of these points which makes this article good to study in terms of research methodology analysis. The study is of popular music in the lives of young people. It positions itself with cultural and social studies. Its aim is to approach the study of the role of popular music in a slightly different way from other researchers on this subject. Initially the author states that few studies work directly with the people who use and consumer music. The study therefore aims to change this by asking people directly what their experience of music is, instead of making theories that do not in interact with reality. The author emphasises the need to concentrate on the real experiences which people have, or say they have, in relation to music. Related to this is the aim to explore what the author refers to as the ‘everydayness’ of music. Rather than focusing on the cultural significance of music through issues such as identity construction, the paper aims to explore the possibility that these issues of music consumption are in fact less important than the more mundane and routine uses of music in everyday life, as a background noise whose meanings are irrelevant. She focuses on the ‘fallacy of meaningfulness’, arguing that music doesn’t necessarily have to be significant or used to define a particular group or consumed by a particular ethnic group or social class. The methodology used by the author involves the use of unstructured informal discussions with three groups of GCSE sociology students, around fifteen years old. Three groups of four to five students were involved in one discussion, all on the same day. There were fewer boys than girls in all