[3] Born in Indonesia, but raised and educated in the Netherlands, Ang received her Doctorate in the Social and Cultural Sciences, from the University of Amsterdam in 1990.
[6] Ang relies heavily on the use qualitative case studies to illustrate her research instead of using quantitative methods to analyse audiences as was popular.
Ang writes of her analytical method for the letters; they "cannot be taken at face value, 'they should be read 'symptomatically': we must search for what is behind the explicitly written, for the presuppositions and accepted attitudes concealed within them.
[9] Ang pioneered this method whilst other practitioners were developing pseudo scientific models to apply to the social sciences, Louise Spence, a fellow soap opera researcher, praises Ang's methodological style: “She had to redefine the position of the analyst and the language of analysis, challenging the once-dominant ideal of a detached observer using neutral language to describe ‘brute facts’, demystifying the idea of any strict separation of theory and data.
As the research was carried out in the Netherlands and the case study was the US soap opera Dallas the work also questions how an audience responds to an international export.