Assessing the 'quality' in qualitative research - The case of text-audience relations

A number of recent works on methodology for media and communication studies have sought to embrace the contributions from cultural studies qualitative investigations, in particular for their contribution to our understanding of media texts. But a problem is emerging from this. While their discussions reference the characteristic measures of validity for quantitative research, no equivalent measures of the strength of qualitative researches have yet emerged. This article draws on David Silverman's work to formulate a number of proposals to remedy this gap. These are tested against four recent investigations of one phenomenon: women as viewers of violent/horror films.