An examination of students’ moderate drinking in two different drinking cultures: implications for alcohol social marketing

Abstract

Excessive alcohol consumption is a public health concern worldwide because of numerous negative consequences associated with it. As a discipline of behavioural change for social good, social marketing acquires knowledge on drinking behaviours and then creates solutions with the aim of benefiting individual drinkers and society. Literature shows that alcohol research has disproportionately focussed on studying heavy drinking. This practice results in the dominant avoidance approach of alcohol control, whereby interventions and policies have been developed and implemented to reduce or prevent heavy drinking. Given that alcohol problems persist to date, this thesis argues for an under-studied promotion approach (i.e., encouragement of drinking moderation) as a pragmatic and sensible approach, and a complement to current alcohol control efforts. Moreover, the thesis adopts a cultural comparison approach between a wet and dry drinking culture, which arguably provides important implications for alcohol social marketing to enhance understanding of moderate drinking. The thesis has three main objectives which are addressed by three papers around the moderate drinking phenomenon amongst university students in two different drinking cultures. Given differences in drinking characteristics, New Zealand and Vietnam are chosen as representatives for wet and dry drinking cultures, respectively. In particular, Paper 1 aims to explore the barriers that prevent students from moderating their drinking by comparing attitudes towards moderation in New Zealand and Vietnam. Paper 2 aims to explore how students’ perceptions of facilitators of moderate drinking vary between these two countries. In Paper 1 and 2, a qualitative survey involving a written vignette was conducted with a relatively large sample of undergraduates from New Zealand and Vietnam (n > 220). The vignette was designed for eliciting students’ perceptions on the factors impeding and/or stimulating moderate drinking from a third-person perspective. Since drinking characteristics of drinkers in a dry drinking culture offer a great opportunity for an in-depth investigation of moderate drinking phenomenon, and building on Paper 1 and 2, Paper 3 aims to quantitatively examine the factors associated with students’ intention to drink moderately in Vietnam, using a quantitative survey on 660 Vietnamese students. Findings from the three papers reveal that students perceive several barriers to, and facilitators of, moderate drinking. These factors are positioned at the intrapersonal level (e.g., controllability), interpersonal level (e.g., peer influence) and environmental level (e.g., alternatives), suggesting that an ecological framework is useful for understanding drinking behaviours and drinking cultures. Adopting such a holistic perspective of the ecological framework can help identify the most necessary targets to bring about the desired change. The response variations between the countries under study provide novel insights into cultural differences in students’ moderate drinking, with external factors being more important and influential in New Zealand, and internal influences being of more concern and prominence in Vietnam. It implies that students in a wet drinking culture like New Zealand do not take personal responsibility for their drinking and suggests that social marketing should move beyond individualistic approaches, and towards the disruption of drinking cultures/practices, in pursuit of a healthier drinking culture. Moreover, there exist gender differences in how the factors affect moderate drinking intention amongst Vietnamese students. Females appear to moderate their drinking through both internal and external control mechanisms, while males tend to moderate their drinking mainly through internal control. Therefore, interventions should be tailored to different gender needs. In conclusion, this thesis addresses the dearth of literature into young people’s decision-making processes towards moderate drinking by demonstrating the value of an ecological theoretical perspective to examine factors influencing students’ moderate drinking, and highlighting the cultural and gender differences with respect to this complex phenomenon. Based on the findings, this thesis helps to inform nonprofit and social marketing to develop interventions aimed at encouraging safe and sensible drinking cultures