ABSTRACT
My career as a qualitative researcher began with every graduate student’s nightmare. After I had attempted to utilize the methodology of grounded theory to present my ndings on how the lower income U.S. teens that I had interviewed were employing discussions about television to talk about their own practices of identication, a senior researcher in the eld stood up in the question and answer session. He authoritatively informed me that a number of scholars had already demonstrated television’s role in identity-formation, and then asked: “so from your research, can you tell us something that is actually new?” I can no longer remember exactly how I answered his challenge, but as I had been well socialized into the historically rooted tradition of critical/ cultural studies research, even in my shame I do remember thinking that his was the ‘wrong’ question.
