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UWA Business School
How do you stop teenagers from binge drinking? It's a question that has long caused government and public health bodies great concern. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Western Australia Business School is a step closer to addressing the problem.

Assistant Professor Wade Jarvis, Professor Simone Pettigrew, Associate Professor Dave Webb, and Research Associate Melanie Pescud spent six months last year collecting data from eighteen internet blog sites and chatrooms.

The team wanted to learn about teenagers' attitudes to alcohol and explore the specific role that each variable - culture, family, peers, school, media, situation, and price - plays in influencing teenage binge drinking.

Previous research, says Pettigrew, has been limited by respondents' honesty. ‘When you do focus groups with young people, high levels of alcohol consumption tend to become a badge of honour. You might get one or two shy people who say they don't drink, but that's it. Everyone else wants to prove, "I can hold my drink."

‘Yet on the sites it was split evenly, with half of the teenagers rejecting the drinking culture - for example, because it would hurt their brain development. It was surprising that it was so polarised, with very little in the middle and so many teenagers rejecting binge drinking. That's definitely much more positive to see.'

Pettigrew has been studying attitudes to alcohol for many years. ‘My PhD examined the role of alcohol in Australian culture, and I interviewed hundreds of people across all age groups, from six to 90 years old. There were many similarities - almost everyone agreed that drinking is part of being Australian. But teenagers are still figuring out what it means to be a drinker. Should they have three drinks? Five drinks? The only way that they can find their threshold is by drinking to oblivion a few times.'

It's a prospect that obviously worries Pettigrew. She talks about alcohol as an extended rite of passage that is more valued to most teenagers than voting or driving a car - an attitude, she says, that needs to be changed.

Pettigrew believes teenagers' cultural perceptions can be changed through the use of a social norms approach. ‘It is about correcting people's views about what actually happens in society. We need to tell teenagers, "Heavy drinking is something that a lot of your peers choose not to do, and you don't have to either."'

It is a task that will be made easier by the team's research findings. ‘We have the reasons why they don't drink straight from teenagers themselves, and we can build on that in social marketing, rather than inventing our own ideas. We can understand the things that really matter to them, such as enjoying the whole weekend rather than spending half of it recovering, or saving money and therefore being able to afford to travel.'

Obtaining such a clear insight into teenage culture was difficult, says Pettigrew. ‘Ours was the first research at UWA to use blogs. It was a challenge, because although blogs are in the public domain, the University's Ethics Committee decided that young people may not realise that their blogs could be psychoanalysed as part of someone's research.' As a result, the researchers were unable to use verbatim extracts, nor access password-protected sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

Despite this, the study made important progress in the area of alcohol research. For example, the study gained insight into the effectiveness of current anti-binge drinking advertising. It found that - despite suggestions to the contrary - vomiting is still seen as unattractive and therefore can act as a deterrent to heavy drinking.

Yet this doesn't solve the social marketing problem, warns Pettigrew. ‘I believe we have to be really careful not to end up on a slippery slope. The blog data suggests that if we emphasise the negative outcomes of excessive alcohol consumption, we risk teenagers turning to ecstasy and other drugs instead.'

As well as taking a social norms approach and reducing the demand for alcohol, Pettigrew argues that we should also reduce the supply. In practical terms, that means strictly enforcing the laws surrounding the supply of alcohol to minors, as well as raising the price of alcohol.

In 2008, the federal government introduced a 70% increase in tax on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks. While the consumption rate of pre-mixed drinks fell by 30.2%, the consumption of pure spirits, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), rose by 13.4%. Overall alcohol consumption fell by just 0.14%.

Critics have pointed to these figures as evidence of the tax's ineffectiveness, but Pettigrew isn't convinced. ‘We can't assume that the increase in spirits consumption was due to young people switching from alcopops to straight spirits,' she argues. ‘The statistics are not segregated by age, and it is possible that the increase could be due to older people increasing their alcohol consumption (for example, because of the global financial crisis).'

What everyone does agree on is the negative consequences of teenage binge drinking. ‘Excessive alcohol consumption among Australian teenagers is a serious problem with both short and long term negative consequences for individuals and society,' says Pettigrew.

‘These consequences include hospitalisation, fights, unwanted sexual encounters, drink driving, and impaired academic performance. We lose hundreds of young people a year because of alcohol poisoning, which is an unacknowledged tragedy.'

One 2007 UK study followed 16,000 people from birth through to the age of thirty. It found that those who were binge drinkers at the age of 16 were more likely, by the age of 30, to: have had a criminal conviction or harmful accident; have left school without qualifications; be earning less; and be suffering more mental health problems.

In Australia, government statistics indicate that alcohol misuse costs the community $15.3 billion each year, including the effects that alcohol has on crime, health, and premature death rates.

It's an enormous problem, but one which - thanks to teenage blogs - is not quite so much of a mystery.


Media Reference
Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]