16 Using Ethnography to Understand Everyday Media Practices in Australian Family Life Donell Holloway and Lelia Green ABSTRACT This chapter discusses the use of ethnography within a media and cultural studies framework to investigate media practices within Australian families. It begins by outlining the theory and practice informing audience ethnography research, and then it provides an overview of audience studies research in Australia over the past quarter-century. The chapter then draws speciically upon the authors’ audience ethnographies, to illuminate how complex behav- iors such as those associated with media consumption are best investigated from a suite of different perspectives: participant observation, interview, ield notes, and an engagement with a number of informants within each house- hold. The production of cultural value through engagement with such media as the television and the Internet crosses the boundary between the household and the wider world and requires self-relection and analysis on the part of interviewees. In addition to this, media practices within the family are both an indication of and a constituent inluence upon the family’s social and cultural norms. Issues about “who lets whom use what and when” are major sites of negotiation for autonomy and independence as children mature within the family context. Thus, by studying media audiences via ethnography, research- ers are offered a privileged insight into people’s everyday lives. The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, First Edition. General Editor Angharad N. Valdivia. Volume IV: Audience and Interpretation. Edited by Radhika Parameswaran. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.