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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.

Collective motives for alcohol consumption represent a nascent field, with individual-level attributes, peer pressure and broad-level environmental elements being at the forefront of research. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of friendships in the context of alcohol consumption and determine what group-level motives exist for alcohol consumption.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 participants aged 18–30, these discussed the role the participant’s friendship group played in alcohol consumption and helped to elucidate what collective and group-level motives existed.

Group-level motives can steer a collective’s alcohol consumption by either endorsing it or degrading it, the findings revealed four group-level motives: these were, competition, conformity, hedonism, with opportunity cost receptiveness acting as a buffer.

The small sample and qualitative nature of the study means external validity still needs to be established to generalize the research to other audiences.

By unpacking group-level motives researchers can develop group-level strategies and match specialized interventions with the right priority group.

This paper is the first to address group-level motives for alcohol consumption and makes an important contribution to understanding how group-level factors can impact individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on a novel multi-modal enabling technique for contextualising brand consumption experiences.

A multi-modal interpretive narrative approach is presented as a means of investigating brands as experiential entities for use in consumer identity projects. It reports the strategic use of different modes of data collection: autobiographical narratives generated by solo participants to create a benchmark of identity and subsequent friendship pair guided discussion interviews. This offers a faster, cheaper and more convenient means of gaining access to consumer experiences of brands than traditional ethnographic methods, which require prolonged engagements within a community.

Consumer narratives of actual brand consumption and of mediated brand consumption are enhanced using this method. The consumer narratives generated provided rich insights into the role of brands in contributing to national identity. The contextualised use and function of identity narratives provided by brands were identified in addition to the identification of national community rituals of consumption.

The multi-modal use of friendship pair interviews with solo autobiographical interviews is shown to offer benefits to qualitative consumer researchers focussing on brand/identity issues. The combination of data collection methods allowed for greater reflexive, memorial and contextualised discussion in the friendship pair interviews about brand narrative consumption and generated responses that advance beyond socio-political conventions concerning brands. Consequently, contextualised brand consumption experiences can be accessed more effectively than in conventional depth interviews.

Social marketing initiatives designed to address the UK's culture of unhealthy levels of drinking among young adults have achieved inconclusive results to date. The paper aims to investigate the gap between young people's perceptions of alcohol consumption and those of government agencies who seek to influence their behaviour set within a contextualist framework.

The authors present empirical evidence from a major study that suggests that the emphasis of recent campaigns on individual responsibility may be unlikely to resonate with young drinkers. The research included a meaning‐based and visual rhetoric analysis of 261 ads shown on TV, in magazines, on billboards and on the internet between 2005 and 2006. This was followed by 16 informal group discussions with 89 young adults in three locations.

The research identified the importance of the social context of young people's drinking. The research reveals how a moral position has been culturally constructed around positioning heavy drinking as an individual issue with less regard to other stakeholders and how the marketing agents function in this environment. Calls to individual responsibility in drinking are unlikely to succeed in the current marketing environment.

The qualitative research was limited to three geographical locations with young adults between the ages of 18 and 25.

The authors explore implications for social marketing theory and for UK alcohol policy. In particular, the authors suggest that the social norms surrounding young people's drinking need to be acknowledged and built into “sensible” social marketing campaigns. The authors suggest that shame, fear and guilt appeals should be replaced with more constructive methods of ensuring young people's safety when they drink.

From the theoretical perspective of contextualism, the paper brings together empirical research with young adults and a critical analysis of recent social marketing campaigns within the commercial context of a “culture of intoxication”. It provides both a critique of social marketing in a neo‐liberal context and recognition of issues involved in excessive alcohol consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel qualitative activity focus group (AFG) method for studying consumption practices. This participatory method, which is inspired by practice-theoretical thinking, combines focus group discussions with activities that represent the practices at the centre of the research.

The application of the AFG method is demonstrated with an empirical study of the transition to plant-based food consumption practices in Finland, involving four group sessions of 13 participants.

The findings from the empirical application of the AFG method illustrate that its key strength is the ability to foster fruitful and natural discussions on routine consumption practices that connect with discursive and practical dimensions and thus generate multidimensional data in resource-efficient ways.

The AFG method extends the methodological approaches in practice theory–oriented research, responding to the call for creative, real-life-reflecting methods that are able to grasp the discursive and embodied dimensions of practices. The method is proposed to be particularly suitable for research on mundane consumption practices.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the features of alcopops which make them attractive to Australian adolescents, which features are most important in determining choice of ready‐to‐drinks (RTDs) over other alcoholic drinks, and whether these vary by age and gender.

Mixed methods study. Participants in Study 1 (focus groups) were 72 adolescents aged 12‐17 from New South Wales, Australia; four groups each from Sydney (metropolitan area), Wollongong (regional) and Dubbo (rural); and in Study 2 (survey), 1,263 adolescents aged 12‐17 recruited through schools, mall intercepts, and online.

The predominant factor influencing preference for alcopops across both genders was taste, followed by alcohol strength and cost, although the association between price and choice was complex. Convenience was an important factor, including ease of carrying and concealing, as was the physical appearance (particularly for younger drinkers). Non‐drinkers and experimental drinkers reported that advertising was a key influencer.

These results elaborate on previous research, indicating that alcopops are appealing to young people for a number of reasons (including taste, cost and alcohol strength), many of which differ in importance depending on age and gender. Given that advertising was found to be a key factor in the preference for alcopops, alcohol‐related media literacy education may help young people to resist these harmful persuasive messages.

This study goes beyond previous research into the role of taste preferences to explore the complexity of reasons for adolescents' alcohol consumption. In doing so, this research provides the basis for future educational and policy interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of social context on young people's sexual lives and sexual health, and to highlight the need for HIV prevention and sexual health programmes which better take into account these contextual influences.

The paper draws on findings from a multi‐method, qualitative study involving young people aged between 11‐24 years, conducted in three rural areas in Uganda. Data were collected by means of 52 single‐sex focus group discussions, 117 in‐depth interviews, and further participatory research with 23 of these young men and women. Contextual information was gathered through interviews with parents (17), teachers (7), religious leaders (7), local clan leaders (6), community‐based NGO/CBO workers (12) and local government staff (33).

Local beliefs about age and gender suggest that intimate relationships and sexual behaviour among young people are forbidden, or at least should be hidden. Social norms produced and reproduced both by adults and young people themselves increase the likelihood of secretive, unprotected sexual relations, and inhibit young people's ability to seek sexual health‐related support and advice.

An understanding of these contextual influences has important implications for improving the design of HIV prevention and sexual health programming in rural communities in Uganda.

We explore the role of workplace friendships as a lens for understanding the emotional element and relational context for personal engagement (Kahn, 1990). The review of engagement theory differentiates personal engagement, recognizing the role of emotions play in enabling individuals’ “preferred selves.” Workplace relationships and friendship provide a conceptual discussion of individuals in social and workplace roles in engagement, drawing on friendship, emotion, attachment theories, particularly Kahn’s work. A case study drawn from recent research illustrates our discussion before concluding with ideas for the development of a future research agenda in answer to recent calls for work on the social context of engagement.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine everyday multilingual peer play interactions through their implications for the development of friendships among immigrant children.

Bringing together linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis as methodological approaches, this chapter explores friendship processes among Moroccan immigrant girls in Spain, specifically by analyzing the structure and composition of one such peer group, as well as their multilingual and multimodal interactions.

The main findings are that the multi-age, mixed-expertise composition of this peer group, as well as the semiotically flexible forms of participation and interaction that it encourages, are conducive to remarkably inclusive groups and strong friendships among a diverse group of Moroccan immigrant girls (including, younger and older girls, girls with disabilities and girls with very different immigration histories). Solid inclusive friendships are cemented in this peer interactional environment first because being able to interchangeably negotiate expert/novice participation roles in game interactions affirms feelings of social competence among all the girls, and second because achieving shared understandings in play entails successfully negotiating rules and expectations, which promotes trust and collaboration, while minimizing conflict. The inclusive nature of these girls’ peer-groups contrasts with the exclusion they encounter in other social settings and relationships.

In this sense, this chapter has important implications for understanding immigrant children’s abilities to respond to forms of social exclusion by forming diverse peer groups and strong friendships of their own. These friendships offer them a path to combat the marginalization they experience in other domains of social life.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the “fashion process” by exploring and comparing fashion‐process networks and friendship networks in small groups of adolescents, and to explore the factors involved in the causation of “clothing leadership” and “popularity” in such groups.

Fashion‐process networks and friendship networks are investigated by sociometric nomination with respect to “clothing acceptance” and “social acceptance” in three age groups of Korean adolescents. The patterns and structures of the networks are analyzed using UCINET 6.0 and Netminer 2.6. Certain factors contributing to “clothing leadership” and “popularity” are measured using Likert‐type scales; these include “clothing interest,” “fashion interest,” and “perceived clothing acceptance.” Other factors of interest (such as “academic grade,” “facial attractiveness,” and “bodily attractiveness”) are rated by peer informants.

Fashion‐process networks are found to be more centralized and polarized than friendship networks. Clothing acceptance is related to peer acceptance and is found to occur within and across friendship links. Clothing leaders are not necessarily the most popular subjects. The most significant factor determining “clothing leadership” is found to be “facial attractiveness.”

Social network analysis is exploratory in nature and the results cannot be statistically verified. However, a better understanding of the characteristics of fashion‐process networks in small groups assists in bridging the gap between individual adoption of fashion at the micro‐level and fashion diffusion in society at the macro‐level.

By illuminating the dynamics of the fashion process in small groups, the study is of assistance in developing marketing strategies that target adolescents.

The study is original in that fashion process in small groups of Korean adolescents is investigated by social network analysis of “clothing acceptance,” and then compared to friendship networks.