A transactional investigation of reading considers comprehension to be more than the duplication of the author's message. Rather, it entails the readers' interpretation of the textual representation that he or she has constructed. Thus, researchers must ask how the reader duplicated the author's creative role. The goal, in other words, is to investigate the processes that give rise to the reader's interpretation. This can be done through an ethnographic mode of inquiry. Ethnographies permit the researcher to study all that the reader brings to reading such as attitudes, interests, and instructional history, as well as the definition the reader ascribes to the event as a whole. Ethnographies also allow for open-ended attitudes--hypotheses that are not formulated a priori, but instead are generated and revised in the course of field work. Furthermore, ethnography, like reading, is itself a transactional process. Not unlike reading, beliefs and actions are pulled from the stream of experience so that they may be evaluated and developed. Thus, ethnographies permit a mode of inquiry that is commensurate with a transactional definition of reading comprehension. (HOD)