79 research outputs found
Maori family culture: a context of youth development in Counties/Manukau
This paper reports on a study designed to bring the voices of young people directly into the social science literature on environmental influences on wellbeing. We analyse accounts from young Maori about their families and the roles they play in their lives in order to focus on strengths and positive resources for the promotion of youth wellbeing.
Interview data were gathered from 12 females and 15 males, aged between 12 and 25 years, resident in the Counties/Manukau region. Participants who were managing satisfactorily in their lives were purposively selected for diversity of background and circumstances. Our “lifestory” approach sought narrative accounts of both everyday experience and the highs and lows of life; data were transcribed verbatim and analysed using discursive methods.
Clusters of themes relating to family environments including relationships with parents, siblings and extended kin groups emerged. Participants provided detailed and nuanced accounts of family cultures, reporting on conflict, caring, gender issues, sensitivity, discipline, levels of guidance and forms of support
Towards promoting youth mental health in Aotearoa/New Zealand: Holistic "houses" of health
A study of the literature on mental health promotion suggests that to a far greater extent than ‘physical’ health concerns, mental health seems to be dominated by the illness focus of established clinical perspectives and practices. In Aotearoa/New Zealand this leaves little in the way of conceptual space or fiscal resources for the development of new preventative possibilities of population-oriented measures focussed on enhancing social and physical environments. Outflanking this unfortunate impasse, indigenous Maori and Samoan (Pacific) conceptual frameworks for health offer holistic theoretical foundations upon which we can work for health through positive development. This paper examines these frameworks and the youth development paradigm to draw out parameters of what might count as healthy youth development in this country
Consuming identities: alcohol marketing and the commodification of youth experience
Marketing has successfully used the postmodern turn in conceptualisations of the human subject and incorporated contemporary theorising of identities and self into its understanding of the key drivers of consumption. Such developments clearly converge in alcohol marketing practices that target young people where commercialized youth identities available for consumption and engagement are a significant element. This paper reports data from young people that reflect the uptake of such identities and considers the challenges that these developments represent for public health and the wellbeing of young people
Creating intoxigenic environments: Marketing alcohol to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand
Alcohol consumption among young people in New Zealand is on the rise. Given
the broad array of acute and chronic harms that arise from this trend, it is a major
cause for alarm and it is imperative that we improve our knowledge of key drivers
of youth drinking. Changes wrought by the neoliberal political climate of
deregulation that characterised the last two decades in many countries including
Aotearoa New Zealand have transformed the availability of alcohol to young
people. Commercial development of youth alcohol markets has seen the
emergence of new environments, cultures and practices around drinking and
intoxication but the ways in which these changes are interpreted and taken up is
not well understood.
This paper reports findings from a qualitative research project investigating the
meaning-making practices of young people in New Zealand in response to alcohol
marketing. Research data included group interviews with a range of Maori and
Pakeha young people at three time periods. Thematic analyses of the youth data
on usages of marketing materials indicate naturalisation of tropes of alcohol
intoxication. We show how marketing is used and enjoyed in youth discourses
creating and maintaining what we refer to as intoxigenic social environments. The
implications are considered in light of the growing exposure of young people to
alcohol marketing in a discussion of strategies to manage and mitigate its impacts
on behaviour and consumption
Youth identity formation and contemporary alcohol marketing
This paper considers linkages between contemporary marketing theory and practice, and emerging conceptualizations of identity, to discuss implications for public health concerns over alcohol use among young people. Particular attention is paid to the theorizing of consumption as a component of youth identities and the ways in which developments of marketing praxis orients to such schemata. The authors’ analyses of exemplars of marketing materials in use in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawn from their research archive, emphasize the sophistication and power of such forms of marketing.They argue that public health policy and practice must respond to the interweaving of marketing and the self-making practices of young people to counter this complex threat to the health and well-being of young people
Supporting Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Research Partnerships
This commentary discusses the framing of the production of a series of online text-based and visual resources aimed at researchers embarking on Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships, and in particular supporting non-Indigenous researchers to think about our/their methods, assumptions and behaviour. We identify the tension in mainstream funding for such partnerships, and discuss the implications of Northern epistemological claims to agendas and universality as against Southern epistemologies acknowledging diversity and challenging oppressions. We note the distinct bases for Indigenous methodologies. Our commentary outlines and illustrates the online downloadable resources produced by our own Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnership, including a video/audio recording, a comic, and blog posts, addressing decolonized collaborative practice
Flaunting it on Facebook: Young adults, drinking cultures and the cult of celebrity
Copyright © Antonia Lyons; Tim McCreanor; Fiona Hutton; Ian
Goodwin; Helen Moewaka Barnes; Christine Griffin; Kerryellen
Vroman; Acushla Dee O’Carroll; Patricia Niland; Lina Samu
Print publication available from: http://www.drinkingcultures.info/Young adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage
in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within
a collective culture of intoxication to ‘have fun’ and ‘be
sociable’. This population has also rapidly increased their use
of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/
video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to be
obsessed with identity, image and celebrity. This research
project explored the ways in which new technologies are
being used by a range of young people (and others, including
marketers) in drinking practices and drinking cultures in
Aotearoa/NZ. It also explored how these technologies
impact on young adults’ behaviours and identities, and how
this varies across young adults of diverse ethnicities (Maori
[indigenous people of NZ], Pasifika [people descended
from the Pacific Islands] and Pakeha [people of European
descent]), social classes and genders.
We collected data from a large and diverse sample of young
adults aged 18-25 years employing novel and innovative
methodologies across three data collection stages. In total
141 participants took part in 34 friendship focus group
discussions (12 Pakeha, 12 Maori and 10 Pasifika groups)
while 23 young adults showed and discussed their Facebook
pages during an individual interview that involved screencapture
software and video recordings. Popular online
material regarding drinking alcohol was also collected (via
groups, interviews, and web searches), providing a database
of 487 links to relevant material (including websites, apps,
and games). Critical and in-depth qualitative analyses across
these multimodal datasets were undertaken.
Key findings demonstrated that social technologies play a
crucial role in young adults’ drinking cultures and processes
of identity construction. Consuming alcohol to a point of
intoxication was a commonplace leisure-time activity for
most of the young adult participants, and social network
technologies were fully integrated into their drinking cultures.
Facebook was employed by all participants and was used
before, during and following drinking episodes. Uploading
and sharing photos on Facebook was particularly central to
young people’s drinking cultures and the ongoing creation of
their identities. This involved a great deal of Facebook ‘work’
to ensure appropriate identity displays such as tagging (the
addition of explanatory or identifying labels) and untagging
photos.
Being visible online was crucial for many young adults,
and they put significant amounts of time and energy into
updating and maintaining Facebook pages, particularly with
material regarding drinking practices and events. However
this was not consistent across the sample, and our findings
revealed nuanced and complex ways in which people from
different ethnicities, genders and social classes engaged
with drinking cultures and new technologies in different
ways, reflecting their positioning within the social structure.
Pakeha shared their drinking practices online with relatively
little reflection, while Pasifika and Maori participants were
more likely to discuss avoiding online displays of drinking
and demonstrated greater reflexive self-surveillance. Females
spoke of being more aware of normative expectations around
gender than males, and described particular forms of online
identity displays (e.g. moderated intake, controlled selfdetermination).
Participants from upper socio-economic
groups expressed less concern than others about both
drinking and posting material online. Celebrity culture
was actively engaged with, in part at least, as a means of
expressing what it is to be a young adult in contemporary
society, and reinforcing the need for young people to engage
in their own everyday practices of ‘celebritising’ themselves
through drinking cultures online.
Alcohol companies employed social media to market
their products to young people in sophisticated ways that
meant the campaigns and actions were rarely perceived as
marketing. Online alcohol marketing initiatives were actively
appropriated by young people and reproduced within their
Facebook pages to present tastes and preferences, facilitate
social interaction, construct identities, and more generally
develop cultural capital. These commercial activities
within the commercial platforms that constitute social
networking systems contribute heavily to a general ‘culture
of intoxication’ while simultaneously allowing young people
to ‘create’ and ‘produce’ themselves online via the sharing of
consumption ‘choices’, online interactions and activities
Supporting Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Research Partnerships
This commentary discusses the framing of the production of a series of online text-based and visual resources aimed at researchers embarking on Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnerships, and in particular supporting non-Indigenous researchers to think about our/their methods, assumptions and behaviour. We identify the tension in mainstream funding for such partnerships, and discuss the implications of Northern epistemological claims to agendas and universality as against Southern epistemologies acknowledging diversity and challenging oppressions. We note the distinct bases for Indigenous methodologies. Our commentary outlines and illustrates the online downloadable resources produced by our own Indigenous and non-Indigenous research partnership, including a video/audio recording, a comic, and blog posts, addressing decolonized collaborative practice
‘Media surveillance of the natives’: A New Zealand case study―Lake Taupo air space
Research has shown news media in post-colonial societies such as Aotearoa New Zealand naturalise the colonising processes by which settler values and social organisation were imposed and the resulting marginalised status of the indigenous peoples. We explore these processes in news reports that claimed Māori wanted to charge for airspace over Lake Taupo. Studying headlines, the originating newspaper article, and subsequent television reports, we show how Māori were constructed as threatening the ability of ‘New Zealanders’ to enjoy the lake. That threat was constructed as imminent although the accounts included no direct evidence or identified source for the reported demand. We consider the one-sided coverage inaccurate, unbalanced and unfair, encouraging perceptions of Māori as hostile and disruptive social actors in our contemporary society. Wider implications of this media performance for this crucial area of social relations are considered
Intentional use of te reo Māori in New Zealand newspapers in 2007
The study aimed to measure the intentional use of words in te reo Māori in a representative sample of newspaper news items about Māori issues.While te reo Māori was made an official language in 1987, it remains endangered and New Zealand remains one of the most monolingual countries in the world. The news items analysed were about Māori issues, and thus more likely to include Māori words. Only words with an alternative in English were counted, and the origin of articles was analysed. Forty-five percent of items included no Māori words. Only words with an alternative in English were counted, and the origin of articles was analysed. forty-five percent of items included no Māori words with an alternative in English, and the average across the sample was 2.4. More than half the Māori words counted described social culture. Use of te reo varied widely among newspapers. No regular Māori language promotion items appeared in the sample, and it provides little evidence of support for New Zealand's endangered indigenous official language. 
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