Abstract

The purpose of this study was to obtain adolescent perceptions of the messages of health and health related activities in teen magazines. Previous studies of teen magazine content have not taken into account the voices of the adolescent women who read them. Even though the reading of popular teen magazines seems to be an innocent activity, these magazines inform the readers with more than current information. They reverberate with our human tradition, expressing a turbulent, troublesome existence of women to our young. ;Audiotaped interview data were obtained from two focus groups, consisting of seven 15--18 year olds and five 12--15 year olds. In addition to the group interviews, at least two individual interviews were held with each research participant. When adolescent women, readers of YM, Seventeen , and Teen, met individually and in a series of four to five focus group meetings to talk about the health messages in teen magazines, their surprising responses did not fit the feminist, critical theory, and media reception analysis methods I used in my study. The seemingly undisputed acceptance of research methods as the sole means to knowledge and truth was interrupted by the voices of the adolescents that resisted methodological codifications. Even though feminist research, critical theory, and media reception analysis provide a rich language to help us understand teen magazines and stress the importance of allowing the readers voice their impressions, they merely theorize adolescent women. ;Hermeneutics or interpretive inquiry transformed my methodologically driven study to a research study that became substantively driven. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics proposes that there is something beyond the filters of method to understanding human life. Hermeneutics led to understanding the significance of certain phenomena in our lives by means of personal address. The claims of "flipping," "freaks of nature," secrets, and propaganda legitimize the hermeneutic conversation about each of these phenomena. The conversations about each of these phenomena led to understanding, a fusion of horizons mediated by interpretation. Furthermore, this substantively driven research study contributes to the qualitative approaches in the human sciences