The structure of family and romantic ties in the soap opera: an ethnographic approach

The authors offer a new approach for the study of soap opera, aimed at discovering the social boundaries within which a particular culture negotiates its primordial relationships. The interaction between culture, power, genre, and gender is revealed by tracing the complex kinship structures of family and romance among soap opera characters and by observing how this structure is activated by the narrative. The advantages of this ethnographic method are examined within the framework of three parallel research traditions of audiences and texts: (a) quantitative analysis of social stratification (and the corresponding gratifications) and the wielding of power (content analysis), (b) analysis of meaning and process in the decoding by viewers (reception) and in narratives (literary analysis), and (c) ties and contexts in the ethnography of viewers and of characters.