“As long as I know how I’m getting home then I’m fine”

At a workshop during the Health in School conference yesterday we got to hear first hand the research that led to a small spate of stories earlier this week.

Andrew Bengry-Howell talked about the views that the 18-25 year olds he and his fellow researchers have been talking to have about alcohol and intoxication.

I’m going to try to get a full set of the slides as they were packed with lots of qualitative information that I suspect will be of interest to readers.

However, the main themes that I took from Andrew’s presentation were that current industry advertising messages work remarkably well, going with the grain of young people’s aspirations; enjoying their leisure time, socialising and adventure. Whereas our current public health messages are failing to impress themselves on their target audience.

The sociological argument was that the alcohol industry have responded to and adapted the biggest cultural challenge they faced in recent times – the emergence of rave culture. They did this by developing marketing and products which mimicked the perceived benefits of the drugs most associated with raves. And as a result alcohol has retained (and arguably enhanced) its dominant position as the drug of choice for young people.

Culturally, Andrew talked about young people drinking to get drunk has become a norm for many young people. He quoted one young woman, Helen, saying:

I don’t drink it for the taste I drink it to get drunk

He said that young people now differentiate between different states of intoxication, and plan how they can mitigate some of the social risks they associate with alcohol, while ignoring the health impacts.

He spoke about how for the groups they spoke to even hospitalisation could be rationalised into a positive, heroic and comic tale of adventure.

This seems to be reinforced by the role of the group in normalising the message that intoxication = fun.

His critique of the current approach to public health advertising was that by focusing on individual drinkers it fails to appreciate the role of the group, which gives permission for (and encourages) extreme drunkenness. He also said that the message of responsible drinking is falling on deaf ears, largely because they are much more attuned to the messages of belonging and fun that the industry send out.

I don’t know how much is new in what is being described, or how much of it is mirrored in the attitudes and aspirations of those under 18, but there’s certainly a challenge to those seeking to work with young people to change their perception of this most popular of drugs.

In discussion practitioners spoke about using normative messages, resistance skills, ensuring that sex and relationships education and drug education were combined, and working more closely with parents as some of the tactics that were being employed with school aged young people. Andrew Bengry-Howell said that he also thought there was a role for schools in helping young people to better understand how advertising works and how to resist its pressures.

Filed under: alcohol