Teenage Sexuality and Media Practice: Factoring in the Influences of Family, Friends, and School.

Publication of North Carolina's first statewide survey of adolescent sexual behavior revealed that a majority of Tar Heel teens were engaging in sex while in high school, and many were becoming sexually active in middle school. One out of six teens who took part in the 1994 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey said they had lost their virginity by age 13. Nearly three quarters of the 2,439 students surveyed reported having engaged in intercourse by the 12th grade. And despite their growing awareness that condoms were the best defense against contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, nearly half of these young people reported they did not use them. In fact, one third of the sexually active students reported they used no birth control at all (Sheehan, 1994). In line with national statistics (AGI, 1994), the study results pointed to a hard reality: All adolescents are vulnerable when it comes to risky sexual behavior. It was against this backdrop that the qualitative study reported here was launched.

The study was guided by the premise that if we can figure out how adolescents with different personal and social identities and sociocultural backgrounds select, interact, and apply media matter in their everyday lives, we will be able to do a better job of reaching them with media messages that they will listen to and act on. Key questions included: What role does the mass media play in national trends of early sexual intercourse, unplanned teenage pregnancies, and out-of-wedlock births? How do mass media images and messages about love, sex, and relationships interact with what teens learn at home, in school, and from their friends? How do teens assimilate through media practice what they learn about sexuality in the course of their everyday lives?

In previous empirical work on adolescents' room culture (Brown, Dykers, Steele, & White, 1994), we had found that many teens draw heavily from media images and storylines as they wrestle with who they are and where they fit in the world. Working from a developmental perspective that recognized identity formation as a key task of adolescence, we devised a model that explained how adolescents' media practice revolved around identity (Steele & Brown, 1995). Drawing on sociogenetic theories of development (Valsiner, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978), we asserted that media practice could only be understood in context. It was with the embodied knowledge acquired through "lived through experience," Steele and Brown (1995) reasoned, that teens "build on and transform the shared sociocultural knowledge available through the media" (p. 557). However, in these earlier studies we had not looked more broadly to see how media practice intersected with the everyday activities and systems of social interactions that make up teens' everyday lives. Our understanding of Lived Experience was theoretically rather than empirically driven.

This study takes the next step and considers the dialectic give-and-take between teens and media in the context of their everyday lives. For most adolescents, that context includes interactions with family in various configurations and with school and friend or peer networks. Church and job affiliations also play prominent roles in some adolescents' lives, but they seem to follow from family and peer influences. Consequently, they were not included among the domains studied.

The study complements two mass communication research streams: content analyses of sexual content in the mass media and media effects research focusing on teenagers. (Effects studies on adolescent sexuality are rare.) Researchers have done a good job of chronicling the kinds and amount of sexual media content available to teens, but knowing what teens can access is not the same as knowing how they use or make sense of what's available. Also, most content analyses focus on a single medium, even though most teens interact with multiple media on a daily basis. Television has received the most research attention, even though magazines, music, and movies become increasingly important sources of information about sex and ways to be as teens grow older (Greenberg, Brown, & Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1993; Huston, Wartella, & Donnerstein, 1998).

In hopes of remedying some of these problems, this study considered how teens weave sexual media content drawn from all of the major media into their identities through media practice. The study was grounded in the belief that the mass media constitute a rich and diverse tool kit (Swidler, 1986; Wertsch, 1991) of sexual scripts (Simon & Gagnon, 1986) and role models that teens use as they explore the possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986) they might become. Special attention was paid to what occurs when teens' media practices intersect with the influences of family, friends, and school.

METHOD

The study was a qualitative, multi-method investigation designed like a funnel--wide at the top (in terms of numbers of participants and areas of inquiry) to generate a broad understanding of teens' media practices, and narrower in focus at the bottom to explore emerging themes in greater depth. The first phase consisted of eight focused group discussions in which a total of 51 teens participated. A subset of these teens, one to three from each focus group, kept written or tape-recorded media journals and then participated in a room tour(1) or in-depth interview.(2) In addition to being suited to the grounded theory approach recommended by Glaser & Strauss (1967), the triangulated data-gathering structure created an opportunity to compare how the teens interacted and what they had to say in a group setting with their behavior and expressions in the one-on-one context of room tours (Steele & Brown, 1995) and in-depth interviews.

Beginning the inquiry with focus groups made it possible to tap into the wide array of ideas and information that emerged as the teens interacted with one another and with the discussion moderator. The goal of the focus groups was to get teens talking about sexuality, operationalized as love, sex, and relationships, in an informal, relaxed setting that would simulate their everyday talk and clarify the socially-constructed meanings they shared (Lunt & Livingstone, 1996). The self-account media journals kept by participants afforded an additional vantage point from which to explore the dialogic tension between group loyalties and individual attitudes, values, and beliefs.

Participants

My recruitment strategy was guided by three objectives:

1. To involve both younger and older teens so that developmental differences could be considered. Rather than screen participants by age, I elected to rely on rank in school as the admittedly rough cut between younger (enrolled in middle school) and older (enrolled in high school) teens.

2. To oversample teens more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior (e.g., intercourse at a young age, unprotected sex, or sex with multiple partners).

3. To include teens who frequently are underrepresented in studies of adolescent sexuality due to recruitment and retention problems and the challenges of getting parental consent.

Black teens, school dropouts, teens who have left home and are living on their own, and teens who use drugs and/or alcohol frequently fall into categories 2 and 3.

Focus group teens were recruited through naturally-occurring friend groups (Anderson and Drexel)(3) and organizations that worked with the populations of interest: a county-wide adolescent parenting program designed to help teenage mothers complete high school without getting pregnant again (Teen Mothers), a recreation center serving a predominantly Black neighborhood (Spencer), and a downtown teen center (City Space) that catered to young people looking for a place to hang out and be with friends after school and on weekends. Most of the teens lived in a Southeastern town of about 40,000; a few lived in adjoining communities. The sample composition is detailed in Table 1.

Table 1. Sample Composition

                                             Kept     Room
Focus Group Participants (Age)   Sex/race   journal   tours

Drexel Middle School (n=6)
  Shawn (13)                        M/B
  Jawaun (13)                       M/B
  Jamie (13)                        M/W       X        X
  Matt (13)                         M/W       X        X
  McKay (13)                        M/W
  Karl (13)                         M/W       X        X

Anderson Middle School (n=7)
  Elizabeth (13)                    F/W       X
  Susan (13)                        F/W       X
  Cassie (14)                       F/W
  Sophie (13)                       F/W
  Julie (13)                        F/W
  Neena (13)                        F/W
  Lindsay (14)                      F/W       X        X

Spencer Community Center (n=8)
  Shamiah (11)                      F/B       X        X
  Amber (13)                        F/B
  Trevy (14)                        F/B
  Cherie (11)                       F/B
  Tanya (13)                        F/B
  Angel (14)                        F/B
  Andrea (11)                       F/B
  Charise (12)                      F/B

Spencer Community Center (n=5)
  Smittie (14)                      M/B
  Tyrone (14)                       M/B
  Arizona (14)                      M/B
  Leon (12)                         M/B       X(a)
  Darious (13)                      M/B

City Space (n=9)
  Leigh (14)                        F/W
  Leah (14)                         F/W
  Nancy (16)                        F/W
  Rob (17)                          M/W
  Weston (16)                       M/W
  Jeremy (15)                       M/W
  Peter (18)                        M/W       X        X
  Alex (16)                         M/O
  Josh (18)                         M/H

City Space 2 (n=7)
  David (19)                        M/W
  Eric(16)                          M/W
  Sean (17)                         M/W
  Marvin (18)                       M/W       X(a)     X
  Micah (17)                        M/W
  Meredith (18)                     F/W       X        X
  Cat (18)                          F/W       X        X

Teen Mother (n=6)
  Stacey (14)                       F/W
  Jade (16)                         F/B       X        X
  Precious (15)                     F/B
  Tiffany (17)                      F/B
  Alycia (17)                       F/B
  Tenita (16)                       F/B       X        X

Riverside High School (n=3)
  Desiray (15)                      F/B       X        X
  Jonathan (18)                     M/W                X
  Andrew (18)                       M/W                X

Note. M = Male, F = Female, B = Black, W = White, H = Hispanic, O = Other.

(a) Incomplete journal.

Recruitment flyers were explicit about the topics of discussion and monetary incentives. For example, the headline on a flyer designed to recruit middle school teens read: "TEENS! Get paid $15 for talking about the media and how it fits with your life!" The text gave additional details about the study and invited teens to "participate in a group discussion about what the media have to do with your opinions about love, sex and relationships." Twenty-four males and 27 females participated in the focus groups. About half of the teens were in middle school; half were in high school. A few of the high-school-aged teens had dropped out of high school but were attending a Graduate Equivalency Degree (GED) program offered by a nearby community college. One teen had completed high school. The focus groups with middle school teens were same sex and, with one exception, same race.

Informed consent was obtained from teens and parents or guardians in two phases: first to participate in a focus group and, subsequently, to keep a media journal and participate in a room tour or in-depth interview. Although this approach necessitated tracking down consent forms twice, it gave teens and their parents a clear choice about participating in the second study phase. Fact sheets about the project invited parents to call the investigator if they had questions, and courtesy visits; were made to the homes of teens who did not have telephones or who wanted someone to talk with a parent or guardian about the teen's interest in participating.

Procedure

Focus groups. Phone calls placed the morning of or day before each focus group reminded teens to come, and care was taken to hold the focus groups at times and in places convenient to the teens. When they arrived, the teens filled out a face sheet containing demographic questions and a brief media questionnaire detailing the media they liked best and how much time they spent with various types of media. After some informal talk about media preferences, two music videos--Blackstone's "I Don't Want To Say Goodbye" and TLC's "Creep"--were previewed to jump start discussion about sexual media content. The videos were selected because they were popular (on MTV's top 10 playlist) and provocative but noncontroversial in their treatment of sexual relationships. In addition, both videos featured Black artists. Studies of TV viewing patterns have indicated that White viewers will watch shows featuring Black actors, but Black viewers are less likely to watch shows with only White actors and actresses (Appiah, 1997).

Moderators followed a loosely-structured discussion guide to ensure consistency across groups, but they were encouraged to pursue related topics as they arose. Actual discussion times ranged from about 60 - 90 minutes. Snacks were served, and the journal-keeping/room tour phases of the study were explained toward the end of each session. Each teenager received $15 in cash for participating in the focus group.

Each focus group was tape-recorded, and I took notes during or immediately following each session. Tapes were dubbed, then transcribed by experienced transcriptionists. I reviewed all transcripts for accuracy. When questions arose, I replayed the original audio-tape and consulted my notes to figure out what was actually said.

Media journals. Each journal-keeper was supplied with a small tape recorder or boombox and two audiotapes, as well as a personal "journal kit" containing a notebook, colored pen, scissors, and glue stick to encourage active participation. I personally delivered a kit to each participating teen's home in order to get a glimpse of the home environment and to demonstrate my interest in the teen as a person. Journal keepers were expected to spend 15 minutes a day for 7 days recording or writing down commentary about what they saw and heard in the media and how it related to what they had learned about love, sex, and relationships at home, in school, and from their friends. Daily prompts were designed to keep journal-keepers focused on the topic of sexuality, operationalized as "love, sex, and relationships." The teens were encouraged to clip out and comment on advertisements, headlines, and pictures about love, sex, and relationships found in their favorite magazines. They were also encouraged to write down or tape-record the lyrics to songs they particularly liked. A $20 incentive was offered for keeping a journal.

Room tours/in-depth interviews. The final stage of data-gathering involved talking in greater depth with teens about what they had said or written in their journals and accompanying them on self-narrated tours of their bedrooms. The room tours (Steele & Brown, 1995) gave teens an opportunity to talk about the significance of their favorite things (Wallendorf & Arnould, 1988). The teens were asked to pay particular attention to room decorations and memorabilia that pointed to their sense of who they were, what they valued, and the kind of life they wanted to lead. Participants who preferred to be interviewed elsewhere were given that option. Several of the high-school-aged teens chose to be interviewed in a local coffee shop. Teens were paid an additional $20 for participating in a room interview. The incentive payment plan was explained in straightforward language (e.g., you "will be paid for ...") in both parents' and teens' informed consent forms.

Validity--assurance that the research actually illuminates constructs of interest--is always a concern, regardless of research method. In qualitative studies, the structure of the inquiry is one test of validity. In this case, the triangulation of data, such as looking for corroboration of inferences from the multiple perspectives of focused group discussions, media journals, and one-on-one interviews, was used to substantiate findings (Rudestam & Newton, 1992).

Analysis

Data analysis began with the writing of my first field notes and continues to this day. During the information seeking phase of the project, I tried to stay close to the data by replaying audiotapes, re-reading transcripts and field notes, and studying what the teens chose to include in their media journals. By continually contrasting what study participants were saying with emerging themes and patterns, I was able to adjust working hypotheses and identify questions that merited further probing. Tentative theories were put to the test of teens' scrutiny during each subsequent round of data gathering. Using this constant comparative approach advocated by Glaser and Strauss (1967), the scope of inquiry was narrowed gradually until saturation, the point when variation is accounted for and understood, was reached. Morse (1994) defines saturation as the test of adequacy in qualitative research. Redundancy is another term for the same thing; in other words, the point when additional data provide no new results (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). This same method of comparison continues to guide consideration of the data as I write accounts of my findings.

Because of the vast amount of data generated--more than 30 hours of tape-recorded material, 13 paper journals, and several hundred pages of verbatim transcripts--I decided to use a computerized data analysis program, NUD-IST, to help me systematically make sense of this complex material. The program facilitated both theory-driven, hierarchical coding and more intuitive, discovery-driven coding (Weitzman & Miles, 1995). Systematically coding the material helped me understand what "was there," what concepts, theories, and supporting evidence were embedded in the data. Using the two coding modes in combination made it easier to be methodical and thorough. Each transcript was coded separately, then coding notations were merged through whole data set reports. I also used the program's report function to maintain a chronological coding log that served as another check on my subjectivity. A review of progressive coding reports make it possible for anyone who wishes to retrace the analytical judgments made, thereby strengthening the reliability or trustworthiness of findings (Hoijer, 1990).

Because the Adolescents' Media Practice Model structures this report, a brief description of the model may be useful to the reader before considering results. The model is based on the notion that teens' interactions with media are part of the dialectical process of becoming that characterizes human existence. For adolescents, this process is wrapped up in forging a cohesive sense of self and figuring out where one fits in the world (Steele & Brown, 1995). Informed by Johnson's (1987) conceptualization of the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural texts, the model was drawn as a circuit to highlight the connections between teens' identity work (Snow & Anderson, 1987) and their media practices, (e.g., the everyday activities and routines of media consumption). The model was based on the premise that teens' sense of who they are shapes their encounters with media, and those encounters in turn shape their sense of themselves, including their sexual selves.

Five key components were specified in the initial presentation of the model. The intention was to represent a seamless process in which Identity, Selection, Interaction, and Application interact against the backdrop or within the parameters of Lived Experience. Lived Experience is a sociogenetic construct that accounts for the complex ways in which race, class, gender, lifestage, and countless other variables differentiate one person's experience of day-to-day occurrences from another person's. Conceived as the situated reality of individuals and groups, the term was placed above the circuit to suggest the role of Lived Experience as ground for the entire circuit. (Being limited to two dimensions makes graphically communicating that notion difficult.)

The media components of the model were defined as follows: (a) Selection: the act of choosing among media-related alternatives; (b) Interaction: the cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral engagement with media that produces cultural meanings; and (c) Application: the ways in which teens make media active in their everyday lives. Illustrative examples or attributes of the three media-related components were positioned along the perimeter of the circuit. They were Motivation, Attention, Interpretation, Evaluation, Incorporation, and Appropriation. In a more recent version of the model (Steele, 1998), Resistance was substituted for Appropriation. According to the model, teens' media practices should be understood as integral parts of the continuous process of cultural production and reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990), including the production and reproduction of sexual norms.

Typical adolescents interact with media all day long. They wake up to the radio, talk with friends at school about yesterday's episode of their favorite TV show, and then flip through TV channels or the latest issue of their favorite magazine while relaxing after school. Teens' selectivity in making media choices (Selection), their creative interpretations of media content (Interaction), and the varied ways they actively use media in their everyday lives (Application) are the essential elements of media practice. But rather than focus on these moments of practice, this analysis considers how teens' media practices intersect with other major influences on teen sexuality--namely those of the family, friends, and school--through social relations. Data presented were generated in 1995.

RESULTS

Identity and Lived Experience

A primary challenge of adolescence is self-definition (Erikson, 1959). Teens work at defining the "real me," including the "sexual me," as they prepare for entry into the adult world. Whereas 50 years ago a teen's family, friends, school, and church probably were the primary influences on his or her attitudes, values, and beliefs about sexuality, today's teens have access to a fifth powerful influence--the ubiquitous mass media. Reaching worldwide, the media bring teens compelling images of sexuality that range from the predictability of a television soap opera or country-western ballad to the unpredictability of an independent filmmaker or recording artist. These media windows on the world (Lippmann, 1922) are part of teens' Lived Experience.

Selection. Not unlike adults at social functions, teens look for people or situations "like them" in the media. When they find people or story lines that resonate with their lives, they pay attention. For example, the everyday challenges of being a teenager sparked Lindsey's (14, White, Anderson Middle School student) interest in the television show, My So Called Life.

   Well, it's my only favorite show ... I like it because it is about a 15
   year old girl and her life. It tells her thoughts and feelings about
   things. She has problems like most teenagers do. She is faced with guns,
   violence, drinking, drugs, sex, and school. It is a good show because it is
   so close in relation to teens nowadays. It shows good ways to handle our
   problems and fears.(4)

The "credibility factor" was a standard many teens applied to media content. For example, Tenita (16, Black, Teen Mother) wrote in her journal that she liked to watch soap operas.

   Their always someone fallin' in love or havin' a baby. Soap Operas' is
   nothing like everyday life. Their relationships are so fairy tale like they
   get divorce and get back together. That doesn't happen much in everyday
   life. Sex on the other hand is about like everyday life. They have sex a
   lot and it is so romantic. I like to watch soap opera's, even though I
   can't see them since I am in school.(5)

Even though she recognized the fairy tale nature of soap opera story lines, Tenita was unable to apply the same critical standard to soap sex. Did this view of sex as romantic make it easier for her to have intercourse at age 14 with a guy she hardly knew who was five years her senior?

A similar naivete (or was it bravado?) was expressed by one of the Spencer boys ,during the group discussion about favorite TV shows.

   What they doin' on TV anti videos is really based on real life, ya know.
   What you see in movies like really happened, ya know? It depends on what
   kind of movie you watch ... right? If you watch the Real Stories of the
   Highway Patrol, they showin', they really showin' what happened in real
   life ... they try to base the show on their actions in real life ...

In the preceding examples, the teens' judgments about credibility hinge on abstract world views that have been acquired over their entire lifetimes. In order for media content to be believable, it must correspond with what they know of the world through lived experience.

Ethnicity also affects Selection. Black teens showed a marked preference for media featuring Black actors, performers, and content. For example, six Black teens but no White teens listed Jason's Lyric, a love story about a Black couple, as their first or second favorite movie. The preference for Black performers by Black teens was even more evident in their listings of favorite musicians. All of the performers they liked were Black even though their musical styles ranged from rhythm and blues (R&B) to rap to jazz. Similar demarcations were seen with magazines. For instance, the White middle school girls all listed YM or Seventeen as their favorite magazines. Both are edited for a mainstream, predominantly White audience. None of the Black girls read these magazines. Instead, they listed Black hair magazines (Black Hair, Braids) and Ebony (beauty and fashion), Jet (current events), and Word Up (music) as their favorites.

Gender differences were also apparent in media preferences. Black artists or musical groups such as Mary J. Blige, Brandi, and Salt `N' Pepa were listed by several of the Black females, but none of the Black males. Similarly, White musicians never were listed as boys' favorites, only girls'. Gender cross-overs were more frequent with television shows, particularly the popular docu-dramas that have come into vogue. For example, Seinfeld was fairly popular with White boys and girls, as were Ellen and Home Improvement. None of these shows appeared in the Black teens' rankings of favorite shows.

Differences in developmental level also affect media preferences. Several of the younger (middle school) White boys listed Forrest Gump as a favorite movie, and they also liked the slapstick humor of Jim Carey's Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber. Mask, another comedy featuring Carey and an improbable plot, appeared four times, a favorite of both Black and White teens. None of these movies showed up as best shows for high-school-aged teens, suggesting that the storylines were less appealing to more mature audiences. For early adolescents, however, actor Carey got it just right: the dumber, the better. In his journal, Karl, then in seventh grade, explained the appeal of "dumb" this way:

   Anyway, um, I really like this movie [Dumb and Dumber]. I thought it was
   very funny. There were several dumb humor parts, and that's the kind of
   humor I like. I find it very easy to watch this because there are very
   sarcastic parts and they did some stupid things. I thought the movie was
   hysterical. The plot was pretty good, too.

Sometimes, however, teens can't find role models to whom they can relate. Tanya (13, Black female) critiqued the television show 90210 for not being "true to life," a phrase that approximates the notion of Lived Experience:

   I used to watch 90210 till I was like, this is not real! I wanted it to be
   closer to the way things really are! How many of us parents will let us go
   spend the night at our boyfriend's house, and have us drivin' they cars way
   up and down the streets. I mean, some people' parents do that, but not
   mine! I mean, shoot, have boyfriends here and there, and talk to your
   parents about every little thing you do, and have them be perfectly
   understanding and never put you on punishment for nothin' you do? These
   kids, I mean, they in jail and their parents don't ground them or nothin'!
   It's like, they just let them go off and do what they wanna do! "Sure,
   honey, you want to borrow my car to go there'?" I hate to think! Shoot!
   They're gonna put me on lockdown. Shoot! Nobody watch that show no more, I
   don't think.

Tanya's perception that nobody watched 90210 anymore was based on her Lived Experience as a Black teen from a lower income home. It is not surprising that the exploits of an essentially all-White cast of affluent teens living in Beverly Hills struck her as "stupid."

Jade, 16, a Black teenage mother, watched TV talk shows from dawn to dusk when she had a day off from school and work because that was the one place she saw other Black teens whose situations paralleled her own. But even on talk shows she rarely found reinforcement for her goal of completing high school and attending business school.

   I don't see anybody in my position on the media, except for negatives. They
   don't show nobody, you know, tryin' to go to school and get good grades `n
   stuff ... And usually when I see the talk shows, it's people talking
   against me, and stuff like that.

Interaction. Historically, American researchers have seen exposure, a term used to indicate time [spent] with media, as the key to media effects. This is problematic, however, because measures of exposure tell us nothing about the context of viewing/listening or the amount of attention paid to the sexual components of media content. Close examination in this study of teens' engagement with media produced an understanding that posits a syncretic and holistic definition of Interaction, one that includes emotional, psychological, and physical dimensions.

The teens' responses to the video stimuli used in the focus groups help to illustrate this point. Both videos told stories about heterosexual relationships: Blackstreet from a male perspective, TLC from a female perspective. The Blackstreet video told a "break up and make up" story (as one of the teens labeled it) by juxtaposing saccharin lyrics with spicy visuals that encouraged erotic readings. Against the backdrop of the smooth, lazy harmonies associated with R & B, the story is told through the juxtaposition of sepia-tinted flashbacks of childhood scenes with cuts of the unfolding narrative and cuts of the group singing. In contrast, the TLC video features an upbeat, hip-hop tempo and the blatant eroticism of what might be characterized as a postmodern belly dance. Bare stomachs, undulating hips, and satin pajamas stirred up by off-camera wind machines combine to weave a sultry spell punctuated by the staccato refrain of a trumpet.

Between-group differences in Interaction were evident already during the showing of the music videos. They were drawn along lines of race, gender, and developmental stage. The middle school White girls squealed and squirmed when confronted with the videos' in-your-face sexuality, while the middle school Black girls giggled and danced. The middle school boys, Black and White, watched mostly in silence but then alternated between being silly and strutting their macho stuff during the discussion that followed. The older teens moaned and groaned at the very thought of watching music videos, then yawned with disdain at Blackstreet's rhythm and blues' style or puzzled over the suggestive language and images used in the videos, especially the narratively-complex Blackstreet production.

Differences were equally pronounced when the teens started talking about the videos. No group spoke with one voice, but there was a tendency in all of the groups to build on shared perceptions. As they responded to the moderator's questioning, the teens adjusted their understanding of what took place in the videos and moved toward consensus about what they had seen and heard. This consensus on content or form held up across groups, supporting the view that even "open" media texts allow only so much room for creative interpretation. Lively contestations within groups over the meaning of certain actions, lyrics, gestures, scenes, and sequences again underscored the importance of development and lived experience in media practice. The tendency of groups to seek common understandings was illustrated by the Spencer boys as they related the storyline of the Blackstreet video. "There was these dudes standin' on the stoop," said Tyrone, 14, launching the story. "They was sayin' ..." "`Bout some, ah, girl," continued Arizona, 14. "Yeah, they um, one of 'em, this girl, they was sayin' ... shit, like play games. Like one day she not in the mood and the next day she try to get off ... and that's about it," interpreted Smittie, 14. Then, Tyrone summed up: "Oh, um ... These people, they were, urn, I think they broke up or somethin'. Then they got back together when he gave her a ring with a Hershey's kiss on it. And they showed these little kids, and the little boy gave the girl one."

Individual-level differences in comprehension and interpretation also were apparent. In some cases, individual teens missed entirely the "preferred" or producer-intended meaning of the videos. For example, most of the Drexel boys were convinced that Blackstone's lead singer Riley wanted to "have sex," but when the moderator pressed them to make clear why they thought this the boys had to struggle to make sense of the flashbacks used throughout the video. Their confusion may have resulted from a lack of familiarity with production techniques, or it may have stemmed from inexperience with the sexual behavior pictured or suggested. For example, several groups had difficulty discerning what the "Creep" video really was about. "That's all I see was dancin' in rows, thas' all. I don't get the point of that creep part, whatever that is," volunteered Smittie, 14, during the Spencer boys discussion. The responses of the 3-member Riverside High School group were even more naive, demonstrating again how interpreting or understanding media content is linked to experience.

   Andrew: Well, I think both of them sort of dealt with problems in
   relationships, or, I don't know, because like even though we couldn't tell
   what was going on in the second one, just the word "creep" implies that it
   wasn't like something necessarily fun that they were doing, you know? Like
   there was some tension.

   Mod: What do you mean?

   Jonathan: Well, if you are going to call somebody a creep or if you are
   calling yourself creep or if you are using the word creep in general sort
   of means that you are either mad at the other person, or, you know. I don't
   know, it just doesn't seem like a very positive word.

   Andrew: What if she meant creep like ...

   Jonathan: Creeping around?

   Andrew: Yeah.

   Jonathan: Well, that's possible.

   Andrew: I guess it could be both.

Application. When the Adolescents' Media Practice Model (Steele & Brown, 1995) was introduced, two types of Application, appropriation and incorporation, were specified. The forms were so intertwined, however, that it was difficult to explicate where one ended and the other began. In the initial formulation, Appropriation was seen as an active "taking" from the media that was expressed through room culture and the conscious modelling of media roles and behaviors. Incorporation, in contrast, was seen as a more subconscious embodiment of the ideologies and cultural styles embedded in media content. However, reviewers argued that these were really one and the same activity.

Upon closer examination of teens' media practices in this study, two types of appropriation have been discerned. One serves the function of social reproduction, the business of reproducing societal norms and making them look natural. Without knowing it, Jonathan, 18, explicated incorporation quite effectively:

   Yeah, I feel like even though I disagree with a lot of things that are on
   TV, it still does affect me. It's kind of like what you see on TV, you kind
   of assume is normal, you know? You see this sit-com of like the normal
   family, and they are doing things, they are kind of saying that this type
   of like behavior is normal ... It's kind of like when you are little and
   you see your parents, they are kind of like this model of like what you are
   supposed to do. So, you like copy that, whether consciously or not. So it's
   kind of like that.

The other type of application takes the form of resistance, teens' practice of using media to open up a space for combating the status quo. Teens who feel marginalized, a category that can include ethnic minorities, lesbians, gays, nerds, drug users, and school leavers, frequently seek out media and story lines that glamorize the very things mainstream society frowns upon. Black teens' enthusiastic embrace of rap music is a familiar example of teens using media to fight what they perceive to be the wrongs of the dominant culture. In this study, it was the City Scape teens who used alternative media to resist what they didn't like about the world around them. Many of the City Scape teens named as favorites High Times, a magazine dedicated to "chronicling the subculture of marijuana growing and harvesting" (McFarland, 1998, p. 728), and movies like Pulp Fiction (graphically violent and sexually explicit in the tradition of film noir) and Flashback (the storyline centers around mind-altering drugs). Some of them were drawn to hard rock and heavy metal music.

What is it about the pounding drums, angry bass, grating guitars, and screaming vocals characteristic of these genres that some teens find appealing? Arnett (1996) says that individual "metalheads" listen for different reasons, but that "most of all there is the ideology of it, the ideology of alienation. To metalheads, heavy metal performers represent a rare authenticity in a corrupt world, and the ideology of alienation gives metalheads a way of making sense of that world" (p. 64). Peter, 18, was a teen who gravitated toward heavy metal because of its raw power, its authenticity. He liked bass mostly for the sensation. "It just like shakes the house," he said, describing how "you could feel the air" being forced out of the speakers by heavy bass instrumentals. His embrace of the methalheads' existential ennui seemed to fit Arnett's (1996) claim: "It is not merely a diversion, but something that both shapes and reflects their view of the world and of themselves" (pp. 68-69). In view of these findings, the model has been revised to include incorporation and resistance to illustrate Application.

The gratifications teens seek when they select different media (Motivation) have a major impact on Application. If a teenager is looking for sexual information to apply in everyday situations, chances are good that the sexual information he or she finds will be "incorporated" in exactly this way. Elizabeth (13, White, Anderson Middle School), for example, was clear about how she applied material gleaned from YM, one of her "more favorite magazines":

   Inside you can read about almost anything that's going on in lots of
   people's lives. They tell you about how to deal with lots of different
   situations such as being overweight, your friends not liking you, family
   problems, or they always give lots of information about love.

Although she reads her horoscope simply for pleasure, Elizabeth reads the Romance section of YM with an eye to positioning her boyfriend on a personal/social acceptability scale.

   There's one section called Say Anything. I like to read this because it's
   all about embarrassing moments. I like to read those because it makes me
   realize how good of a day I had! Another section that I like is called
   Romance. It's all about the sweet things that different guys have done for
   girls. This is good because then you can add qualities to your dream
   boyfriend, or realize how good you got it since he does all that kind of
   stuff.

If anyone discounts the importance of teen relationships, Elizabeth's observation should dispel their doubts: "What they [adults] don't realize is these are our practices for when we get older. I think they should be taken very seriously ..."

Less accepting of the romantic script promulgated by teen girls' magazines, Meredith, 18 (White, City Space), sharply criticized that script even as she made it explicit. She used it to reinforce her own resistance, a move that exemplifies Application as Resistance. When asked during her interview/journal to describe the image of young women projected by Seventeen magazine, she responded:

   I think that, you know, it's a little like probably rich girl, and she has
   moral values, and you have to go out, probably do good in school, and you
   have got to have a boyfriend, and you, you know, can't do drugs or try
   alcohol, you know, and you can't smoke cigarettes, you know. You can't do
   this or that, or this or that. And it's, but it's, you know, like a
   12-year-old girl gets that and she thinks that that has to be her life. You
   know, she has to like go to school, meet some guy, get married, have kids,
   you know, and have a career at the same time. And it's just like, it
   doesn't really give people a chance to think for themselves. [It's] some
   kind of a brainwashing thing.

Ironically, even though Meredith was sharply critical of mainstream media messages and was keeping company with an alternative crowd during the period of the study, she nevertheless confessed to wanting to live out the mainstream script, not in the present, but in 5 or 10 years.

   Most of the people I know and myself included would say that of everyone
   that I hang out with, I am one of the most likely people to end up married
   with kids and a little house with a white picket fence and just completely
   happy that way, you know, and having it last just because of the way I am.

Her words suggest how difficult it is to escape the pull of the dominant ideology, particularly when one is part of the privileged class (White, middle class) that reproduces it through the schools, courts, mass media, and other institutions that are part of the apparatus of power (Foucault, 1988). Imagine the impact of these same institutions and the dominant ideology that guides their actions on teens who see themselves as not fitting the accepted scripts.

Family, Friends, and School

Sexuality, like the self, is a social construction subject to a variety of competing influences. The peer group is an important source of sexual values, prescriptions, and social comparisons, as is the school, where adolescents spend from one third to as much as one half of their waking hours on an average school day. Parents, too, are important. As Harter (1990) points out, "Parental expectations, evaluations, and exhortations also play a major role and may well conflict with the values of the peer culture" (p. 353). Although initially conceived as discrete identifiers, it became clear as the study unfolded that the terms family, friends, and school hold multiple meanings for teens. In addition, activities in all three spheres were intertwined, as evidenced by Arizona's (14, Black male) account of a conversation with his mother. "She was tellin' me about sex! ... and them boys was tellin' me about it too," he related. "Did they tell you the same thing?" the moderator asked. "Naw, my mama was tellin' me not to do it ... All the boys was tellin' me to jump on it!"

Family. The family traditionally has been viewed as the primary socialization agent in a child's life, the teacher of the culture and its unwritten rules (Youniss & Smollar, 1985). Recent work on teen vulnerability and resiliency (Cairns & Cairns, 1994; Resnick et al., 1997) suggests that strong or close family ties are one predictor of a teen's ability to get through adolescence without siring a child, landing in jail, developing a drug habit, or dropping out of school. Of course, the challenge for researchers is to agree on what constitutes strong, close, family, and risky behavior, all terms with contested definitions (Kaplan, 1997). Of particular interest in the context of this study was whether teens who came from troubled families relied more heavily than other teens on media for sexual information or role models. The data provided no definitive answers but did make it clear that everyday family dynamics influence teens' media practices as well as their outlooks on life.

Arizona, for example, shared a house with eight brothers. Still talking about his mama's warning that he'd better have "safe sex or no sex," Arizona told his focus group peers: "My daddy told me before he left, he said, `Don't do nothin' I wouldn't do!'.. So I can do anything, you know what I'm sayin'? Cuz my daddy do anything!" Although physically absent, his father's attitude toward women and sex undoubtedly affected Arizona's interpretation of media narratives about sex (Interaction) and his subsequent Incorporation of those narratives into his own life.

Matt (13, White), in contrast, was a member of what typically is cast as the all-American family. However, despite living with two parents (mother and stepfather) and two sisters in a middle class home, television sometimes played the role of parental stand-in, particularly when it came to learning about sexual relationships. The following excerpt from his tape-recorded journal provides a good example of how the influences of the family and the mass media intersect, producing a "multivoicedness" (Wertsch, 1991) that characterizes much of what we say, think, and feel. Matt always made explicit in his journal at least two voices by reading the written journal instructions aloud, into the taperecorder, then responding to the prompt in his own words. When responding to a prompt about what he wanted for himself as a sexual human being, Matt replied:

   Okay. I'd like at one time to get married and have children. I guess I'd
   like to, umm, ahh, have sex. I don't know if I will wait until I'm married.
   Of course, we would all like to, but if that is possible.... Yeah, okay. I
   will move on. I really hope my mom doesn't listen to this. Umm, which she
   better not. She won't.

   Prompt: Talk about what you've learned from your parents and other family
   members about love, sex and relationships.

   Matt: Not much. It's not exactly a dinner table discussion, unfortunately.
   Well, not unfortunately. You always hear that it should be from your school
   and stuff. I talk more with my sister than anything, and I haven't enough.
   Okay, let's move on. I'm sorry. I'm mumbling on and on.

   Prompt: Have you ever talked with your mother, father. Oh ... by observing
   the way they act?

   Matt: Not really. Umm, can't really relate to a 40-year-old at this moment.

It is instructive to note the interplay of voices when just Matt was speaking. First, he gave voice to dominant society's preferred sexual script, the one third-graders chant to taunt one another: "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Suzie with a baby carriage." Then, he appropriated the message encapsulated in the music, movies, and TV sitcoms he liked: "I guess I'd like to, umm, ahh, have sex. I don't know if I will wait until I'm married." Matt's "inner voice" or conscience interrupted the media message that sex outside of marriage is acceptable with a midstream "mm, ahh," apparently triggered by fear that his mother might hear his doubts about waiting for marriage to have sex. Then, her voice and possibly that of his minister and friends are heard: "Of course, we would all like to ..."

Several teens attested to the adverse effect of being given too little autonomy or trust by parents. Jade, 16, for one, said her parents' refusal to let her even sit on the front steps with her boyfriend caused her to start seeing him in the park and eventually led to her skipping school and spending time during the day at his empty (of adults) house. Now she has a six-month-old daughter. Even though Jade, like many of her peers, wanted freedom from parental rules, she nevertheless acknowledged that her parents did have some influence on her media practices. For example, when Jade got pregnant during her junior year in high school, her mother gave her a copy of People magazine (Oct. 24, 1994) that featured a cover story titled, "Babies Who Have Babies." "I think it was a joke," Jade wrote in her journal. "But I don't know. I went ahead and read the article."

Shawn (13, Black), one of the Drexel Middle School boys, complained to his focus group peers, "I don't even getta watch what I wanna watch ... my mom comes in and is flickin' the channels." Earlier, when talking about the almost voyeristic enjoyment they derived from watching the bikini-clad females in the television show Bay Watch, he and his buddies indicated that they kept their visual appetites hidden, at least from their parents.

Friends. Important as parents or other significant adults are in the lives of most teenagers, adolescence remains a time when young people reach out to their age-mates to explore who they are and what to expect from the world (Griffiths, 1995; Kaplan, 1997). Throughout adolescence, teens gather information about same-sex and opposite-sex relationships from their peers. Scholars from various disciplines have helped us understand where ideas about who to love and how it feels to be in love originate in their explorations of motivated models (Lutz, 1992), cultural models (Bachen & Illouz, 1996; Holland & Eisenhart, 1990), and the development of feeling norms (Simon, Eder, & Evans, 1992). Teens' media practices help explain how those models and norms become enculturated (Kottak, 1990) and shape desire.

Within the context of close friendships and wider circles of friends (Giordano, 1995), teens use the media both as something to do and as something to consume. "[W]e need to realize that people no longer learn primarily through verbal instruction in this culture, but through pictures and images, which get directly at fantasy and desire and feed the hunger for stimulation and excitement" (Bordo, 1995, p. 3). although teens spend a lot of time alone with their music, often in the safe haven of their bedrooms or cars (Larson, 1995), it would be a mistake to think that teens' love for music is a solitary pleasure. When the moderator asked some of the City Scape teens whether listening to music was "kind of a one-on-one thing," the reply was: "No, man! Most of the time it's like in the van, just sitting around with a bunch of friends, just driving around with a bunch of friends. Sometimes, it's alone, but either way it's phat!"

Echoing this theme of music being a connector to friends even if listening alone, Peter, 18, gave this account:

   I'm talking in this thing [tape recorder] as I'm driving along, cuz I'm
   listenin' to a song right now. I'm not sure who it is, but it sounds really
   cool, and really quiet, and really, uh, I don't know what the word for it
   is. Aaah, I'm just thinkin' about that girl that I know, that I was talkin'
   to on the Internet, becuz this is like.... it kind of reminds me of her in
   a way ... the stuff that she listens to and everything [voice rising], you
   know? And the stuff that she was playin' in the background when we were
   talkin' on the phone was kind of like this sort of stuff. I don't know.
   It's just so hard to find somebody who has the same interests, and then I
   do, and she's like 18 hours away by car.

Peter's comments demonstrate how intertwined the various aspects of media practice are. In this case, he is drawn to the music (Selection) and continues listening to it (Attention) as he drives because of his interest in the girl (Motivation) he met on the Internet. She, in turn, had described (or identified) herself to him by the music she liked.

School. During the study design phase of the project, I conceptualized school as the shorthand for sex education classes. However, the equation was faulty. School holds far more complex meanings for most teens, and they learn more about sex in the hallways than in the classroom. Among the several objections study teens voiced about school-based sex education programs was the heavy emphasis on disease, redundancy from one year to the next, avoidance of topics the teacher might find embarrassing or objectionable, and a tendency to speak about sexual relationships in scientific instead of humanistic terms. Elizabeth summed it up when she observed in her journal, "We've had so many sex-ed classes, but I don't think they help any ... because ... all they teach is basically body parts. Nobody really cares about what's inside of them."

Hungry for information about how to develop and sustain relationships, teens instead get information about self-esteem and how to say "no." When invited toward the end of the in-depth interviews and in the last-day journal prompt to ask questions about anything that was on their minds, the middle school boys, in particular, made it clear that there were plenty of things they wanted to know about sex but weren't learning in school. Jamie raised these questions:

1. Can a girl get pregnent all of the time or just at a certain stage?

2. Can any non-diseased couple get herpies or warts by sex?

3. Is there protection for a male and/or female that prevents everything including pregnency?

DISCUSSION

The questions above, posed by an eighth-grade boy, underscore the vast amount of work that needs to be done if we want adolescents to learn what they need to know to prevent pregnancy and avoid STDs before they become sexually active. Because the scope of the study was intentionally broad and relied on qualitative research methods, its contribution to the literature does not lie in hypothesis-driven findings about what approach to promoting healthy sexuality will work best under what circumstances. Rather, its contribution is to offer (a) a new way of understanding the relationship between teenage sexuality and the mass media, and (b) evidence that the influence of media is inextricably meshed with the contexts of teens' everyday lives.

Although I use the term theory with trepidation, the study contributes to mass media theory by refining the Adolescents' Media Practice Model introduced by Steele and Brown in 1995. It does so by more carefully explicating the media components of the model--Selection, Interaction, and Application--and by considering Lived Experience from the perspective of ethnicity, gender, and developmental level. The study also makes a contribution by putting its emphasis on media practice rather than on media content or media effects, the traditional foci of mass media research. Although sexual media content must certainly be factored into discussions of teens, sex, and media, the evidence in this study suggests we must look beyond content to how it is used, understood, appropriated, or resisted by teens immersed in the ups and downs of everyday life.

Teens are active users of media, and their media practices depend to a large extent on their lived experience, the concrete, on-the-ground ways they have experienced the world on a day-to-day basis. Teens respond to media from where they are and from what they know of life. Unfortunately, some teens don't often see "people like them" or lives "like theirs" in the media. When they do see or hear people and storylines they can relate to, the data suggest these teens may be influenced more than peers who see images of themselves all the time. Somehow, regardless of race, class, gender, intelligence, or any other personal quality that distinguished one from another, the study teens bought into the idea of the American dream (e.g., education, job, house, and family). Even teens highly critical of the dominant ideology or teenage mothers who had jeopardized their chances of achieving the dream still aspired to many of its tenets.

The discrepancies between teens' media preferences, interactions, and applications according to race, class, gender, and developmental phase underscore a major limitation of the study. It was cross-sectional. A longitudinal study of teens from pre-adolescence (ages 10 - 11) to early adolescence (12 - 14) through mid- (15 - 17) to late-adolescence (18 - 19) is needed if we want to consider more fully the role of the developmental phase in teens' media practices. Similarly, more cross-disciplinary research is called for. One reviewer made this observation about an earlier draft: "The findings themselves echo what professional sexuality educators and surveyors have been reporting for seventy years." If this is so, it is high time mass communications researchers joined the conversation. Cat, 18, spoke for a lot of teens when she summed up her feelings:

   I wish we could be flat out. I mean like honest about it. You know'? Cuz
   it's like everyone wants to hide their sexuality and the fact that people
   have sex. And they say they don't want to expose kids to it because it's
   such a horrible thing. You know, it's like, oh god. You know? And it's like
   your period is just a dirty thing that you can't discuss in front of
   people, or it's like, it's not natural. And I wish when I was a kid someone
   could have just said, "This is sex. This is the way it is, and this is how
   we do it. This is what is going to happen to you. You're gonna get your
   period. It's gonna hurt. You're gonna have to do this about it, you know?
   This is what makes you pregnant," and let that just be it. And not do it in
   such a way that made me feel so paranoid about it, and so embarrassed
   because I wanted to know what was going on, you know? Cuz I couldn't talk
   to my mom, cuz all my mom did was give me books, and I couldn't talk to my
   teachers ...

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

(1) "Room touring" is a research technique devised to encourage teens to talk about the cultural artifacts, many of them drawn from the media, housed in their bedrooms. The method involves giving teens a handheld taperecorder and inviting them to conduct a tour of their rooms. Talking about the mementos, trophies, photos, posters, and other material objects many teens display in their bedrooms opens the door to the meanings they associate with them. Those meanings, in turn, tell the researcher a lot about the "identity work" (Snow & Anderson, 1987) in which the teen is engaged.

(2) Two teens participated in in-depth interviews but did not complete media journals, and two teens completed media journals but did not participate in interviews.

(3) The names in parentheses are pseudonyms for the focus groups. Teen names also are pseudonyms.

(4) Focus group, interview, and room tour transcripts recorded the teens' language--syntax, vocabulary, grammar--as it was spoken.

(5) Written journal entries were typed using the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization of the original.

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Manuscript accepted April, 21, 1999

This study is based on the author's dissertation research at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The project was supported by the Exploratory Center for the Study of Health Behaviors in Vulnerable Youth, School of Nursing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Grant No. P20 MH 49875. The author is grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Address correspondence to Jeanne Rogge Steele, 101 Scripps Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701; e-mail: steelej @ohiou.edu.

Jeanne Rogge Steele Ohio University