Audience-Based Research in the Era of Democratization

As part of a multi-sited international research project (Montreal and Kinshasa) organized around the idea of audience-based research, the “Ethnographies of Listening” research team attempted to go beyond previous studies of the Congolese popular music industry by conducting systematic surveys throughout Kinshasa from June 2002 to August 2005. In the early phases, a large amount of time was spent considering the question of representativeness: how to be sure interviews were conducted in a random and representative manner. Subsequently, the reality of field research and the constraints imposed by limited communication and financial resources led to discussions about the very notion of representativeness and whether or not it was pertinent to the study of popular music. Local and foreign researchers disagreed about the importance of having equal representation in the survey sample and selection of sites. This difference of opinion led to useful discussions about the supposedly inclusive nature of this “collaborative” research project and how its evolution coincided with what some team members referred to as a democratic moment in national politics.