摘要
  
美国社会是一个大熔炉，美国文化也呈现出多元化的发展趋势，尤其是流行文化找到了其迅速发展的的沃土 — 青少年群体。在青少年群体中，流行文化飞速发展。美国青少年长期接触流行文化后，他们的价值观是否会受到影响？受到怎样的影响？这两个问题引起了广泛的关注和讨论。
本文以文化以及流行文化的相关理论为基础，并且对从内容研究和现象分析为研究方法，致力于流行文化对美国青少年价值观的影响和作用。文章首先阐述了文化的三个定义，并且结合威廉姆斯对‘流行’一词的解释，对分化的6个定义做了一定的理解和分析。其次，文章将价值观的定义简单的做了介绍，并且分析了美国人所倡导的六项基本价值观和理念，他们分别是民主、独立、机会平等、竞争、物质享受和清风工作。这六条基本价值观，可以帮助我们了解美国人的特点以及在作为评价美国青少年价值观是否正确的尺度。最后，本文通过一些流行文化可能导致的青少年效应（例如暴力和美国梦的建立）分别分析了流行文化对美国青少年价值观消极和积极的影响，并就一些消极影响给出了一些建议以改善和提高流行文化的氛围，引导青少年健康的成长。

关键词：流行文化， 价值观，青少年，影响，美国

Abstract

America is a melting pot, where various kinds of cultures tend to develop and permeate. Especially popular culture finds its fertile land for its rapid development—teenagers. Among teenagers, popular culture spreads and develops at a quite rapid speed. Being exposed to popular culture for a long time, are teenagers’ values influenced by popular culture? And how are teenagers influenced by popular culture? These have been widely paid attention to and argued.
The paper is based on culture and popular culture theories and carried out by contents research and analyzing facts. First, the paper demonstrates the three definitions of the term ‘culture’, and introduces the six definitions of the term ‘popular culture’ after connecting ‘culture’ with the term ‘popular’. And then, the paper briefly introduces the definition of values and lists and explains the six basic American values—individual freedom and self-reliance, equality of opportunity and competition, material wealth and hard work. These six basic values can be the system of measuring standards of teenagers’ values. At last, the paper provides some useful suggestion by analyzing the two facts or examples—adolescent violence and television talent show to improve the current situation in the United State and lead teenagers to a healthy way to grow up.

Key words: popular culture, values, teenager, influence, America

1    Introduction
The United States is absolutely a melting pot. The United States is a nation of diversity socially, which causes that the country is also a land of diversity of cultures where all kinds of cultures develop and spread rapidly from the young to old, groups to groups, between nationalities and classes. Therefore, popular culture, a special form of culture, finds its fertile land—the teenager group—for its rapid development. In the teenager group, popular culture develops and spreads at an incredible speed. For example, according to Nielsen SoundScan, 2009 music purchases in the United States were up 2.1% over 2008 figures.