Excessive drinking is now a normal part of forging and maintaining friendships – according to this latest piece research with 80 young people aged 18-25.

Apparently, many young people cannot imagine alternative ways of getting people together other than through drinking; and most don’t consider the health risks, which is probably linked to the fact that most exessive drinkers expect to severly cut down drinking when they are older.

For A level students this is an extremely good illustration of the ‘context dependency of deviance’ – binge drinking is simply not seen as deviant for young people – but in the context of adults and wider society – it is!

Having considered the meaning of binge drinking for young people (nice bit of intereactionist, empathetic research there), the author goes on to hypothesise about why young people drink to excess. Some of the reasons include –

1. (as the author of the report says.)… ‘with the increasing consumption of alcohol in the UK in recent decades, getting drunk together has become an established part of the experience of young adulthood – in other words, people do it because it is normal.’ When something becomes normal, it becomes less shameful to do it.
2. It is something to do with the ‘special status’ of youth – as an in-between phase – so when you’re young you can justify drinking excessively as something you do in your ‘liminal phase’ of life – it’s OK because you won’t be doing it when you’re in your 30s and have kids – unless you’rE like me and ‘ave it large every Friday of course (Joke!) 
3. There are a lack of credible opportunities for young people to get together and socialise – most obviously in terms of ‘sober’ physical spaces (link to Left Realism here!)
4. The drinks/ night club industries have managed to colonise youth-space – marketing cheap drinks to young people, especially at weekends, and thus helping to create a binge drinking culture
5. Finally, it is because drinks are so cheap –  young people don’t measure their maximum potential consumption in terms of units – but in terms of cost!

So binge drinking is normal – how would you interpret it? –

a. Go down the interpretivist/ post-modern route – and see binge drinking as something young people just do because it’s fun, giving them something to talk about next week, as something that’s an expression of freedom, as a a life enhancer? Moreover, if it’s just a life phase, who really cares?

B. Or The consensus route – do you take the increase in binge drinking as a sign of social decline – as an indicator of youth being disempowered, drinking because their lives are too controlled; and indicator of their lack of opportunity to do anything meaningful and  creative?

C. Or the more Marxist route  – do you see it as a reflection of the evil drinks corporations manipulating youth – invading youth culture and normalising binge drinking in a quest for profits?

D. Probably most importantly – do you remain scepitcal and question the validity of the research – how do they define ‘excessive’… how representative a sample is 80? etc…

If nothing else – this research illustrates how you can interpret something in numerous ways…