Drinking to the “edge”: gender differences in context-specific risks
Abstract
Purpose
The risk associated with heavy episodic drinking in young people has caused concern among public health professionals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the gender differences in the perception of risk in alcohol consumption behaviour for better targeting of messages.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative descriptive study examines the narratives of 28 young people’s experience of a “night out” framed as the Alcohol Consumption Journey to examine the ways young men and women experience context-specific risks for alcohol use.
Findings
The young people perceived participation in the Alcohol Consumption Journey involved risk to their personal safety. Both young men and young women described their alcohol consumption as controlled and perceived the risks as external inevitabilities linked to the public drinking establishments. However, they displayed noticeable gender-based differences in the perception and management of risk in diverse contexts of the Alcohol Consumption Journey. Young women drink in close friendship groups and have a collective view of risk and constructed group strategies to minimise it. Comparatively, the young men’s drinking group is more changeable and adopted a more individualistic approach to managing risk. Both groups exhibited prosocial tendencies to protect themselves and their friends when socialising together.
Originality/value
The concept of “edgework” is effective in providing an explanatory framework for understanding young people’s ritualised Alcohol Consumption Journey and to illustrate the context-specific risks associated with alcohol use.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Sharon Vera and Sarah Pore from the Health Promotion team of MidCentral District Health Board for their support with the research. Further thanks are extended to Niklas Dresler and Kirwan Attwell for assisting the authors with the data collection.
Citation
Dresler, E. and Anderson, M. (2018), "Drinking to the “edge”: gender differences in context-specific risks", Health Education, Vol. 118 No. 1, pp. 17-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/HE-04-2017-0022
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited