Projects & Research Partnerships

Introduction

When governments propose changes to alcohol policies, the announcement is often followed by public debate on the potential for the policy to change the country's drinking culture. The UK Government's 2012 Alcohol Strategy made changing the drinking culture a strategic policy aim. However, specifying what the drinking culture is, what is problematic about it, what it should be changed to, what interventions might trigger such a change and whether success has been achieved, have all been problematic topics in alcohol policy discourse and the research literature.

Existing literature has typologised drinking cultures along a series of key dimensions which risk conflating varied drinking behaviours into homogenous 'national drinking cultures'. An alternative literature which characterises drinking cultures of different societal groups through detailed description, using qualitative methods, fails to adequately address the variety of drinking cultures which exist within and across nations.

We aimed to address this by focusing on one key manifestation of a nation's drinking culture: drinking occasions. We developed typological models of drinking occasions and supplemented these with focus group research in order to gain greater understanding of how drinking occasions relate to drinkers' broader social and cultural lives.

Research methods

We used an embedded mixed methods approach with the qualitative components informing and validating the main quantitative study.