Peggy J. Miller is Professor of Communication and of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her academic interests include socialization, cultural psychology, everyday talk, personal narrative, social class, and ethnographic methods. Her recent work has focused on the small, virtually invisible stories of personal experience that occur in many homes, including the process of promoting self-esteem. She has found that the period from age two to three is a time of intense initiation into narrative and that personal storytelling is already culturally differentiated, serving as a powerful medium of socialization. Her many publications include studies among low-income European-American, and African-American families and comparative research in Taiwan.