Youth Drinking Cultures

European Experiences

Margaretha Järvinen, Robin Room

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138273504
• eBook ISBN: 9781351870559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How can 'binge drinking' be explained and understood? Is alcohol consumption related to the particular cultural characteristics of some European countries? Should heavy drinking cultures be seen as a mainstream youth phenomenon or as marginal - and is this different in different countries? A team of leading researchers addresses these questions and more in their analysis of the alcohol consumption patterns of European young people. Alcohol consumption is an important marker of transition from childhood to early adulthood, yet the timing, intensity and purpose of adolescent drinking varies dramatically between countries. The contributors provide cross-national comparisons to investigate how drinking behaviour varies, examining factors such as gender, societal context and family socio-economic backgrounds. Youth Drinking Cultures offers a comprehensive set of perspectives on adolescent drinking in Europe. In linking issues around social identity and the life-course with a highly topical area of media and policy concern, the book will be of great value to sociology and social policy scholars, especially youth researchers, and also to professionals working with young people.

Chapter 1

Youth Drinking Cultures:
European Experiences

Margaretha Järvinen and Robin Room

Introduction

The aim of the book is to analyse drinking patterns among young people, with particular emphasis on experiences in different European societies. Among the world regions, Europe has the highest levels of alcohol consumption (Rehm et al., 2004). The production of alcoholic beverages is important economically and given a high cultural value in a number of European countries, and drinking is enmeshed in diverse ways in cultural symbolism and practices all over Europe. These general social patterns are reflected in high levels of drinking, and of alcohol-related problems, among teenagers and young adults (Rehm et al., 2001). Foremost among the problems related to drinking for young people are injuries and other health and social problems related to alcohol intoxication.

Within the relatively high levels of alcohol consumption in Europe, there are nevertheless wide variations between different societies. The fact of such variations has been noted by travellers through the centuries, although there have been some changes over time in the comparisons reported. Thus, the Roman historian Tacitus noted about the habits of life in Germania, contrasting them with the civilised life style of the Romans: ‘Drinking bouts, lasting day and night, are not considered in any way disgraceful.… People satisfy their hunger without elaborate preparation and without delicacies, and in drinking they show no self-control. You have only to indulge their intemperance by supplying all that they crave, and you will gain as easy a victory through their vices as through your own arms’ (from Tacitus’ Germania, cited in Rosberg, 1931, p. 3ff).

Similarly, Martin Luther complained of ‘the abuse of eating and drinking’ of his fellow-Germans, noting that ‘the Italians call us gluttonous, drunken Germans and pigs because they live decently and do not drink until they are drunk. Like the Spaniards, they have escaped this vice’ (Austin, 1985, p. 147). A few decades later, the English traveller Fynes Moryson agreed with Luther about the Germans: ‘let the Germans pardon me to speak freely: … to their drinking they can prescribe no mean nor end’. On the other hand, in his view ‘drunkenness is reproachful among the French, and the greater part drink water mingled with wine’. He also saw British drinking in his era as mostly moderate: ‘in general the greater and better part of the English hold all excess blameworthy, and drunkenness a reproachful vice’. Moryson found heavy drinking, on the other hand, among the Irish: ‘especially at feasts, both men and women use excess’ of whiskey, he reported; he had not seen heavy drinking as ‘a woman's vice’ anywhere else, ‘but only in Bohemia’ (now in the Czech Republic; MacManus, 1939, pp. 19–20; Austin, 1985, pp. 211–213).

Also Scandinavians and Finns have traditionally been portrayed as hard drinkers, as ‘proud and self-willed people’ with a tendency to ‘go berserk’ when drinking alcohol, ‘either because they put porse in their brew or because they carry liquors badly’ (Rosberg, 1931, p. 5). And as noted by the Swedish historian Carl Gimberg in the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘In Finland berserk is still very wide-spread, and usually caused by spirits, especially spirits of poor quality … Like madmen [the drinkers] draw their sheath-knives and start swinging them while jumping or running with soft knees and cat-like movements. This condition should not be mistaken for sisu [the Finnish variant of a never-say-die attitude], although people with sisu are probably more prone to show this kind of behaviour than are others’ (Rosberg, 1931, p. 4).

As Ahlström briefly reviews in her chapter in this volume, contrasts between European drinking cultures have figured quite heavily in the modern literature on variations in the cultural position of alcohol. The most important contrast has been between the southern European wine cultures and ‘the rest’. Recurrently, southern European drinking cultures have been held out as a model by those critiquing their own country's drinking culture, whether it be American scholars holding up the ideal of an ‘integrated drinking culture’ (Ullman, 1958), Swedish newspaper columnists whose ‘dream of a better society’ centres on ‘continental’ styles of drinking (Olsson, 1990), or present-day British politicians seeking to reform ‘binge Britain’ into a ‘café drinking’ culture (Parker, 2003). Often a further division has been made in terms of the traditionally dominant beverage: not only ‘wine cultures’, but also ‘beer cultures’ stretching from Ireland to the Czech Republic, and ‘spirits cultures’ north of the Baltic and in eastern Europe. The fact that analyses in the European Comparative Alcohol Study (ECAS; Leifman, 2001) were forced to rename the countries north of the Baltic the ‘former spirits-drinking’ countries is an indication that this way of dividing up Europe is no longer so neat, in an era of some homogenisation in drinking; in terms of the most-used beverage (in pure-alcohol terms), Sweden became first a beer-drinking country, and now a wine-drinking country.

The contrasts between European drinking cultures have been implicitly focused on adult drinking; in fact, one might guess that the implicit contrasts are often of middle-aged male groups (for example Csikszentmihalyi, 1968). In terms of the analyses in several of the chapters which follow, one contribution of this volume is to bring these traditions of thinking about differences in the cultural position of drinking to bear on samples of younger respondents, and in particular on those in their mid-teenage years. How far can the ideal-type differences in drinking cultures described in the literature, oriented to adult drinking and resting often on a limited empirical base, be found already as contrasts in the patterns of youngsters at the beginning of their drinking career? The ability to undertake such analyses now reflects the emergence in recent years of two separate cross-national traditions of data-collection which have transformed our ability to make quantitative cross-national comparisons. These are the ‘European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs’ (ESPAD), most recently carried out in 35 European countries in 2003 (see Andersson and Hibell in this volume), and the ‘Health Behaviour in School Aged Childen Study’ (HBSC) of 11–15-year-olds, including data from 26 European countries in 2001/02 (see Richter et al. in this volume).

In forms such as the analyses in this volume, the ESPAD and HBSC data-sets have made a very substantial contribution in advancing our ability to conduct cross-cultural analyses of youth drinking, and in particular youth drinking across Europe. But the ESPAD dataset, and to a lesser extent also the HBSC dataset, have also made contributions to the cultural politics of alcohol. Like other cross-cultural comparisons, the main form in which their results appear in the public media is in the ‘league table’: which country's 15-year-olds top the charts, for instance, in terms of rate of ‘binge drinking’? As can be seen in the chapters by Andersson and Hibell and by Ahlström, Denmark, constituent parts of the UK, Ireland and Finland tend to top the ESPAD charts on intoxication and reported alcohol problems; in the HBSC results (the chapter by Richter et al.), Ireland ranks lower but Ukraine is added to the top tier. Such results have raised the profile of youth drinking as a fundable research problem in Denmark, the UK and Finland. That half of the substantive chapters in this volume are by researchers from these three countries may well partly reflect this policy effect of the international comparisons.

As can be seen from the contents of this book, the effect of the availability of the ESPAD and HBSC comparisons has been to give a substantial boost to quantitative research, and particularly to quantitative comparative research, on youth drinking. In the meantime, there has also been a substantial growth in the qualitative literature on youth drinking, both in Europe and elsewhere. Instances can be found in the literature of explicitly comparative qualitative analyses (for example Pyorälä, 1995; Beccaria and Sande, 2003), but such studies are inherently hard to do and thus not common. In this introduction, we draw upon this literature to complement the quantitative studies in the volume.

Differences in Youth Drinking Cultures

The cross-national surveys of adolescent drinking – ESPAD and HBSC – show that big differences persist between European countries in drinking and drunkenness. In the wine-producing countries, adolescents’ drinking can be described as relatively frequent but modest on each occasion. In the Nordic countries (Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) adolescents consume alcohol more seldom, but when they drink, they typically drink a lot. In the beer-countries Denmark, Ireland and the UK, adolescents both drink frequently and to intoxication. This pattern, though, cannot be found in all beer-countries. Adolescents in Germany and Belgium for instance, report intoxication far more seldom than adolescents in Denmark, Ireland and the UK (Ahlström et al., 2001; Hibell et al., 2004).

An interesting feature in some of the youth cultures in the northern and northwestern parts of Europe is that gender differences in drinking are relatively small. While 15–16-year-old boys in France and Portugal report drunkenness rates four times higher than girls’ rates, the drunkenness rates in the UK and some of the Nordic countries are gender equal (in some countries girls even outrank boys).

Regression analyses of data from the ESPAD-study show that across European countries, beer and spirits consumption are the most important predictors for heavy drinking or ‘binge drinking’ (five or more drinks on one drinking occasion) (Kuntsche et al., 2004). Binge drinking in turn is likely to be part of multiple substance use (cigarettes, marijuana and other illegal drugs), a relationship that has been demonstrated in many studies from different countries.

The ESPAD data also show an association between heavy drinking and risk perception at country level (Morgan et al., 1999). First of all, the perception of risk associated with binge-drinking varies greatly between countries, with only 12–13 per cent of adolescents regarding binge drinking as risky in Wales and Denmark compared to more than half of the adolescents in some Mediterranean countries (Portugal, Cyprus, Turkey). Second, the country level of risk conception is explicitly related to heavy use of alcohol – the lower the risk awareness level, the higher the drunkenness rates – and less clearly associated with the broad measures such as lifetime prevalence of drinking in the country's teenage population.

The drunkenness rates in different ESPAD-countries are also strongly associated with young people's positive expectancies in relation to alcohol (see Andersson and Hibell in this volume). Thus, the countries with high drunkenness figures (for instance Finland, Ireland, UK and Denmark) are also those where adolescents expect most positive consequences of drinking (to feel relaxed, happy, more friendly and outgoing, to have fun and forget problems). On the other hand, the expected negative consequences of drinking (get a hangover, do something one regrets later, feel sick, etc.) are highest in countries such as Romania, Italy, Portugal and Turkey, where the drunkenness figures are low. Although adolescents in the northern and north-western parts of Europe do not expect negative consequences of alcohol, they obviously experience such consequences relatively often. When students in the 35 ESPAD-countries were asked how often they had actually encountered alcohol-related problems (school problems, problems with parents or friends, sexual problems and problems related to violence and crime), the students from these countries were at the top of the list. The highest sums of problem items were found in Denmark and Isle of Man, followed by Finland, Ireland, the UK and the Baltic states.

A New Culture of Intoxication?

Reports from different countries indicate that young people today drink more, and with a clearer focus on drunkenness, than earlier generations. In general, time-trends suggest that youth alcohol consumption has increased over the last 30–35 years (Gabhainn and François, 2000; Johnston et al., 2002; Schmid and Gabhainn, 2004). It has been claimed that the increasing alcohol and drug use among teenagers and young adults represents an escalation of the ‘psychoactive revolution’ – the tendency for people everywhere in the late modern world to develop more and more potent means of altering their ordinary waking consciousness (Courtwright, 2001, p. 2).

The decade when ‘a new culture of intoxication’ (cf. Parker et al., 1998) seems to have manifested itself was the 1990s. For this period research from different countries showed an escalation in the use of both legal and illegal drugs among young people (Settertobulte et al., 2001). In Britain, for instance, the 1970s and 1980s were decades of apparent stability in young people's drinking, while the weekly consumption by young people doubled across the 1990s (Parker et al., 1998; Measham, 2004). According to British school surveys, the average alcohol consumption of young adolescents (11–15 years) increased from 5.3 units per week in 1990 to 10.4 units in 2000 – and has fluctuated around this level since then (Department of Health, 2005). The increase in young people's alcohol consumption in the 1990s was accompanied by a dramatic rise in the use of illegal drugs, primarily of cannabis, LSD and the ‘dance drugs’ amphetamine and ecstasy (Parker et al., 1998). From the 1980s to the mid and late 1990s the proportion of persons reporting experience with illegal drugs almost tripled in the UK (ibid., p. 13). One of the central messages in Parker et al.’s work is that young people's use of illegal drugs cannot be understood separately from their use of alcohol. Drinking, and drinking heavily, is the ‘underpinning’ of their psycho-active substance careers. According to Measham and Brain (2005, p. 267), alcohol and drug use today ‘intertwine and celebrate cultures of hedonistic consumption’. In the interviews conducted by these British researchers, the majority of young people conceived of their nights out not just to go out drinking but to get drunk. Measham and Brain point out that certain individual and social constraints surrounding drunkenness, for instance norms condemning heavy female drinking and a visible loss of self-control, seem to have disappeared from the youthful drinking scenes. Instead young people of both genders are said to pursue a ‘determined drunkenness’ tied to a ‘wider drug-wise and consumption-oriented leisure time culture’ (ibid.).

In Denmark as well, the drinking and drunkenness levels among teenagers rose in the 1990s. Here, the increase started in the 1980s and escalated in the 1990s (Gundelach and Järvinen, 2006). In the past five years the increase has stopped, but Danish 15–16 year olds have retained their position (together with British teenagers) as European record-holders when it comes to drinking and (especially) drunkenness.

In Finland, the development is very reminiscent of that in Denmark and the UK, although Finnish youths started out from...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Youth Drinking Cultures
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Youth Drinking Cultures: European Experiences
• 2 Understanding Cultural Differences in Young People's Drinking
• 3 Drunken Behaviour, Expectancies and Consequences among European Students
• 4 Gender Differences in Youth Drinking Cultures
• 5 The Impact of Socio-Economic Status on Adolescent Drinking Behaviour
• 6 The Impact of Parents on Adolescent Drinking and Friendship Selection Processes
• 7 Consumption beyond Control. The Centrality of Heavy Social Drinking in the Lifestyles of English Youth
• 8 Being ‘Taught to Drink’. UK Teenagers’ Experience
• 9 Alcohol Use among Danish Adolescents: a Self- and Social Identity Perspective
• 10 Conclusion: Changing Drunken Component or Reducing Alcohol-related Harm
• Index