NPRI case study: Alcohol use
Alcohol Marketing and Young People
(Professor Gerard Hastings, University of Stirling: January 2006 – December 2009)
The health and social costs of British drinking have become increasingly prominent in recent years, and important policy steps have been taken in response. The direction of policy has varied north and south of the border, with the Westminster Government adopting a focused approach to address what it has seen as a minority, misuse problem, and Scotland trying to address the relationship which the whole population has with alcohol. Central to the debate is alcohol marketing, estimated to be worth a staggering £800 million each year.
This NPRI-funded study set out to shed light on the complex relationship between drinking and marketing, and specifically on whether advertising encourages consumption. To do this, nearly a thousand teenagers in the west of Scotland were interviewed when they were 13 years old and then again two years later. The questions covered their drinking and their engagement with alcohol marketing. These behaviours and exposures are both difficult to measure because they come in many different forms: consider all the types of drinks there are and then multiply these by all the different forms of promotion currently in play, from traditional billboards to innovative digital marketing. To help cope with this complexity, interviews were conducted at home, enabling the use of sophisticated questions using prompts like show cards and images, and also switching to self-completion procedures for more sensitive questions about drinking experience.
The study has had an impact at a European level through the alcohol platform of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Health and Consumer Affairs (DG Sanco), in Scotland through the Holyrood alcohol team and Alcohol Focus and also regionally through presentations at conferences and seminars.
Recently it has also had two major impacts for UK policy in reports from the British Medical Association (BMA, September 2009) and from the House of Commons Health Committee (HC 151-I January 2010). The BMA report Under the Influence examined the impact of imagery, communications and marketing on the drinking behaviour of UK youngsters. The BMA commissioned Professor Hastings and his team to write the report, and while its scope goes beyond the NPRI study data from it formed a key element. Considerable national debate about the need to limit the amount of alcohol promotion has followed that report.
The Health Committee Enquiry into Alcohol was informed by expert guidance from the same team and included emerging data from the NPRI study on, for example, the ubiquity of alcohol marketing showing that 95 per cent of 13-year-olds remember seeing alcohol marketing in, on average, five different marketing channels.
In summary, this NPRI study is addressing a complex and important public health problem and having a valuable impact on policy makers and commentators even before many key analyses on marketing and youth drinking have emerged.
Further information is available from Professor Gerard Hastings
Professor Gerard Hastings
Email: gerard.hastings@stir.ac.uk