Teenage Room Culture

Abstract

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