TEENAGE ROOM CULTURE - WHERE MEDIA AND IDENTITIES INTERSECT

An adolescent's bedroom is an important site for the everyday work of creating identities. What the authors have come to call room culture i s both a theoretical perspective and a valuable research strategy. The oretically, it is assumed that individuals actively and creatively sam ple available cultural symbols, myths, and rituals as they produce the ir identities. For teens, the mass media are central to this process b ecause they are a convenient source of cultural options. Over the past 5 years, the authors have pursued this line of reasoning with a serie s of small-scale, primarily qualitative, studies with adolescents. The y have found that getting teens to talk about their bedrooms is a prod uctive way to establish rapport, especially around sensitive issues su ch as sex and alcohol use, and to understand in context who each perso n is in relation to the larger culture.