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Young adult’s drinking is about pleasure, a communal practice of socialising together in a friendship group. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolving support practices of drinking groups for better targeting of health communications messages.

This qualitative descriptive study examined the narratives of 28 young people’s (age 18-24 years old) experience of a “night out” framed as the Alcohol Consumption Journey.

The Alcohol Consumption Journey ritual consisted of three phases: preloading, going out and recovery. The participants described multiple forms of support practices located at each phase of the Alcohol Consumption Journey for maximising pleasure, minimising risk, encouraging supportive behaviours, enhancing group cohesion and protecting the drinkers from alcohol-related harm. Hence, support practices played a critical part in constituting and consolidating the drinking group. While the support practices appeared to be structured into the Alcohol Consumption Journey, they were activated differently for young men and young women. Support practices were an important driver in perpetuating the Alcohol Consumption Journey.

The paper extends Vander Ven’s concept of “drunk support” to better understand young adults’ evolving support practices in the ritualised Alcohol Consumption Journey.

This study aims to examine within-family and peer communication (type and frequency) and subsequent wine consumption of young adults. Specifically, this research investigates whether the distinct types of technical, prohibition and moderation-based communication affect wine knowledge, responsible drinking practices, and ultimately, wine consumption.

The authors adopted an econometric approach based on a cross-sectional study with data collected from a large sample of 1,466 students in France.

The authors show that wine technical-based messages from parents help young adults acquire knowledge about wine, which in turn increases consumption. Also, moderation-based messages make young adults both, more knowledgeable about wine and, as expected, more responsible in terms of drinking practices, subsequently limiting their consumption. Finally, prohibition-based messages marginally decrease wine knowledge and have no impact on responsible drinking practices.

This article provides relevant recommendations for public policymakers and brands, who should target parents and peers as part of their responsible drinking communication or advertising campaigns.

To fill a gap in the literature on young consumer behavior and food marketing, this research primarily investigates the relationship between family (and peer) communication and young adults' wine consumption, particularly whether and how, which type(s) of parental communication influences young adults' wine knowledge and adoption of responsible drinking practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how members of an online alcohol reduction community learn, construct and engage in alcohol reduction consumption consistencies.

Blog data from 15 individuals participating in the online community of Hello Sunday Morning were collected and analysed. Informants also participated in a series of in-depth interviews to gain a self-reflective perspective of alcohol reduction action, activities and interactions.

The findings indicate learning of new alcohol reduction consumption consistencies occurs through three modes or learning infrastructures: engagement, imagination and alignment, enabling a collective sense of connection in the creation of new alcohol-related rituals and traditions, competency of practices and transmission of values and norms beyond the community.

The results underscore the need for social marketers to recognise learning of alcohol reduction behaviour is continually negotiated and dynamically engendered through socially reproduced conditions, responses and relationships.

This study contributes to the transformational potential of social marketing situating behaviour change as a social interaction between actors within a dynamic market system.

Purpose – This chapter illustrates how female university kendo club members participate in kendo-related hegemonic drinking in formal (heterosocial) and informal (homosocial) club settings. An alternative perspective on gender relations and identity politics in Japan is outlined in this chapter by describing the significance of hegemonic drinking for female kendo club members within homosocial spaces.

Methodology – As a participant-observer, an ethnographic method was applied for an 18-month period as a quasi-member of a Japanese Sports University Kendo Club. Key to accessing the female members' lived experience was the primary author's participation in daily training and the consumption of alcohol in various kendo spaces. The data discussed in this chapter were collected via semi-structured interviews, daily self-reflexive descriptive field notes and ethnographic interviews.

Findings – Hegemonic drinking practices in heterosocial university kendo club spaces encompass networking opportunity, transference of knowledge, and fortitude building, all of which are systemized to support the advancement of male members. Although female members are relatively obscured in heterosocial spaces, women mimic and engage in hegemonic drinking practices in homosocial settings to substantiate meaning to their membership.

Research limitations/implication – Research that engages with the intersection of sport and gender needs to consider aspects of social interaction not only of the physical component of the sport but also the other day-to-day activities related to it. The examination of women and kendo-related hegemonic drinking in this chapter provides an insightful perspective and highlights the value of the ethnographic method in unexplored places of enquiry integral to researching physical cultures and body politics in Japan.

Purpose – To outline new research on the ways in which older athletes incorporate drinking practices into their social and sporting identities. Drawing on research with older Australian athletes, the chapter asks us to re-imagine the sport–alcohol nexus to include new sites and subjects that can shed light on wider articulations of the pleasurable and problematic relationships between sport, alcohol and social identity.

Design/methodology/approach – In the first part of the chapter, key themes in sport and ageing research are discussed. In the second, issues of alcohol, older age and sporting identities are considered, drawing on research at the 2017 Australian Masters Games. This sets the scene for a fuller discussion and analysis of some of the missed opportunities in alcohol and sport research, and their implications for sport and social policy, health promotion and social care more broadly.

Findings – The chapter reveals several under-developed opportunities in a broader research agenda on sport and alcohol, including the role alcohol plays in conferring membership and belonging to the sporting communities of older athletes. The chapter suggests that a recalibration of popular understandings of sport, ageing and alcohol – both as separate and as inter-related concerns – may provide an opportunity for addressing wider social concerns with ageing more broadly.

Research limitations/implications – Discussion of ageing and alcohol, through the lens of sport, has important implications for an analysis of drinking practices and in sport, and for sport and social policy, health promotion and social care.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meso-level social forces that influence moderate drinking in young women’s friendship groups through the application of social capital theory.

A qualitative inquiry was undertaken utilising peer-paired and small focus groups to explore young women’s drinking choices within their existing friendship groups. Guided by emic and etic perspectives, friendship groups were analysed to inform archetypical representations that illustrate group-level social capital exchanges.

The approach led to identifying four social capital and drinking archetypes. These archetypes indicate social capital-led “influencers” and “followers” and highlight the displays of capital practised by young women in alcohol consumption contexts.

The social marketing insight drawn from this study of young women’s drinking behaviours will inform social marketers on future strategic directions about how they can use alternative methods to segment the social market of young female drinkers and develop value propositions that will motivate them towards adopting or maintaining moderate drinking practices.

This study contributes to social marketing theory by demonstrating the worth of social capital theory as an alternative lens for social marketers to apply in explorations of group influences that shape behaviour. The research findings in the paper demonstrate how deeper theorisation provides rich insight into the meso-level, complex behavioural influence which effect young women’s alcohol consumption.

Many existing interventions to reduce excessive drinking in university students attempt to target individual cognitions, which ignore the wider contextual features that drive excessive drinking and mark this as an important aspect of university life. The purpose of this paper is to explore students’ views about preventing excessive drinking at university, specifically by using frameworks that take into both account individual and social influences.

In all, 23 young adults aged 20-30 (12 females; M age=22.91; SD=2.57; 18 students, five recent graduates) took part in semi-structured interviews to explore their views about drinking and measures to reduce excessive consumption. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis.

There were three themes identified in the analysis. These themes were named “the role of alcohol in student life”, drinking transitions’, and “prevention challenges” and each had related sub-themes.

Targeting students before they commence their course and highlighting aspects of university life that do not involve alcohol may help to reduce the pressure often felt to drink in social situations. Providing novel, credible alternative socialising options that do not involve alcohol should be explored to determine their acceptability, and their potential to reduce excessive drinking.

Few studies explore what students themselves think about reducing alcohol consumption and most interventions focus on changing individual cognitions rather than features of the social environment. This study highlights that changing social practices related to drinking in combination with targeting individuals may be more fruitful avenue to reduce excessive alcohol consumption.

This study aims to explore the barriers that prevent students from moderating their drinking by comparing attitudes towards moderation in a wet (New Zealand) and dry (Vietnam) drinking culture and examines whether these barriers can be understood by applying an ecological framework.

A qualitative survey involving a written vignette was conducted with a sample of 226 and 277 undergraduates from New Zealand and Vietnam, respectively. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis.

The analysis reveals that students perceive several barriers to moderate drinking at the intrapersonal level (e.g. positive attitude towards drinking), interpersonal level (e.g. peer pressure) and environmental level (e.g. socialising activities), suggesting that an ecological framework is useful for understanding drinking cultures. The response variations between the two countries provide novel insights into cultural differences in students’ perceptions, with external factors being more important and influential in the wet culture and internal influences being of more concern in the dry culture.

The findings highlight that students in the wet drinking culture do not take personal responsibility for their drinking and suggest that social marketing should move beyond individualistic approaches and towards the disruption of drinking cultures/practices, in pursuit of a healthier drinking culture.

This study provides novel insights into the barriers and facilitators of moderating drinking. Further, the findings demonstrate the value of a holistic ecological framework for understanding student drinking cultures. The comparison between two diverse cultures revealed how insights from one culture can help to understand deep-seated practices and meanings in another.

This paper aimed to examine the role of social factors and individual factors on alcohol drinking in a licensed premise.

An unobtrusive covert systematic observational study of 632 licensed premise patrons was conducted during May 2015.

Convergence between genders was observed with females drinking as much and as long as males; 57.9 per cent of patrons drank two and more servings, exceeding daily recommended amounts. Social factors such as group size are more influential on drinking than individual factors such as gender and smoking status. Serving practices such as straws and buying drinks in rounds influence the quantity of alcohol consumed.

The study focussed on one licensed premise. Replication of the method outlined in the current study in different licensed venues, states and countries will permit the role of policy, drinking environments and drinking cultures to be understood.

Drinking patterns of both genders are converging. Thus, intervention efforts should target both genders.

This paper contributes a structured observation protocol that extends our understanding of alcohol drinking beyond quantity by incorporating observation of duration of consumption for each serve, permitting identification of social and environmental factors that can be used to lower licensed premise alcohol drinking.

Recent research (Barton and Husk, 2012) suggested that in the UK we are seeing a shift from the traditional “pub-club” drinking pattern to a “home-pub-club” pattern. In the latter model often excessive early evening drinking is occurring in the private sphere in the absence of external control, leading to problems when the drinkers enter the public sphere. Moreover, pre-loading has become a key aspect in the drinking patterns of many of the Night Time Economy (NTE) population with around 60-70 per cent of people drinking some alcohol prior to going out. In the previous work (Barton and Husk, 2012) 50 per cent of people were drinking significant quantities of alcohol prior to entering the NTE. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

However, whilst these statistics give a general overview of patterns of drinking, they fail to provide the depth required to uncover potential mechanisms. It is generally assumed that the driving force behind this cultural shift in alcohol use is price. However, the feeling is that this is too simplistic. To explore this, the authors conducted a set of in-depth qualitative interviews with young people to ascertain why pre-loading is such an entrenched aspect of their drinking culture (n=20).

This paper provides the preliminary findings of that research. It shows, amongst other things, that beyond the price factor many young people seemingly need alcohol to cope with the NTE; that they prefer the safety and control of the environment that drinking in the private sphere provides; and that some of them (despite drinking alcohol) simply do not like pubs.

The paper adds to the discourse on pre-loading by suggesting richly described underlying mechanisms of action.