Research Methods, Room Touring

Room touring is a qualitative research method developed to learn more about how adolescents use media in their everyday lives, especially in their own bedrooms. In a room tour, the adolescent takes the interviewer on a tour of his or her bedroom, pointing out visual images and objects, including media, and discussing their personal significance and use.

The technique draws on the idea that an adolescent's bedroom can play an important role in the process of self-definition and that media materials are often used in the process. Research in the 1980s found that American adolescents spent almost 13% of their awake time in their bedrooms and often used media as a way to learn more about themselves and to regulate their moods. Later, in the 1990s, national surveys found that adolescents' bedrooms had become little media centers equipped with many kinds of media, including music systems, televisions, and computers hooked up to the Internet.

Jane Brown and her students conducted a series of small studies with adolescents in which room touring was one of the methods used to learn about the media's role in adolescents' identity development. The researchers found that for many teens, the bedroom is a safe, private space in which experimentation with possible selves can be conducted. In one study, [Page 731]girls reported often bringing their friends to their rooms to talk, to read magazines, and to listen to music. One 15-year-old said, “My room's like my personal place. It's what I want it to be…I can just make it like me.”

Brown and her colleagues concluded that tours of an adolescent's bedroom can suggest the complexity of a teen's identity structure and approach to the world as well as which sources of influence, including mass media, are important in the teen's life and construction of self. In some of their studies, they took still pictures or videotaped the walls of the rooms as the adolescent commented into a handheld tape recorder. They described one boy's room:

Other images included a picture of Arsenio Hall (because “he dresses”) and labels from brand-name clothing.

One challenge of room touring is categorizing the vast array of images and artifacts in the room. Brown et al. concluded that most of what they saw could be grouped into one of six categories: (1) appropriation (using a cultural image in a personal way, e.g., as Jack had when he drew his own images from popular movies); (2) social connections (maintaining ties with a loved one, e.g., pictures of relatives or friends); (3) fantasy (imagining being someone or with someone, e.g., Jack fantasizing about magazine models); (4) social differentiation/integration (being different from or similar to someone, e.g., Jack emulating Arsenio Hall's style); (5) personal art; and (6) bricolage (compilations of disparate images and items).

...