Television And Everyday Life In Rural China

Ethnography is a typical qualitative research method. And ethnography has been widely used in the research of anthropology and sociology. Although ethnography has just been applied to the research of mass communication for a short time , it has got some achievements. The research of the thesis , using ethnography as the research method, carried out fieldwork at a small village of China's Anhui Province and tried to find out what kind of role had TV played and how TV influence this small village.The thesis has four parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the village and reasons for why to choose this village as a research object. The second part tries to give an answer to the question, enumerates the researches and opinions of other researchers on the question, and briefly introduces the research method.The third is the core of the thesis. Firstly, the media environment of Chang'an Village is analyzed: the status of TV, as a mass media, at the village. Then as to the audience, what kinds of characteristics the villagers have and how these characteristics react to the villagers' televiwing behaviors. The survey is carried out to know what kind of TV programs can the villagers watched and how they decode these programs. Finally, the thesis probes into the influences of TV to the behaviors and ideas of villagers' daily life. Although the thesis follows the research of communication flow which founded by Lasswell, but the difference is that each part of communication has been put in a wider social background to emphasize the power of social environment.The fourth part tries to analyze the phenomena mentioned above and finds out the cause of the phenomena. So the survey can be regarded as a sample and be used as a reference to solve the problem.