Interruption to research design: substance driven research

When adolescent women, readers of YM, Seventeen, and Teen, met individually and in a series of four or 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 used to guide the study. The undisputed acceptance of research methods as the sole means to knowledge and truth was interrupted by the voices of the adolescents that resisted methodological codification. Hermeneutics or interpretive inquiry transformed my study to one that became substantively driven and contributes to the qualitative approaches in the human sciences.