Young People, Social Media and Alcohol: A Heady Mixture?

Alcohol consumption by young adults and the associated health problems are prominent matters of health policy concern in many countries. Young adults are also heavy users of social media such as Facebook; social media are... [ view full abstract ]

Alcohol consumption by young adults and the associated health problems are prominent matters of health policy concern in many countries. Young adults are also heavy users of social media such as Facebook; social media are widely used to exchange images of young adults engaging in alcohol-fuelled social activities. The study sets out to investigate how young adults (18 to 25) interact with images of alcohol-fuelled and alcohol-free socialising shared via user-generated content on social media, and to explore how a safe-drinking advertising message affects these interactions. 90 young adults participated in a study combining a three-way between-subjects experiment design using eye-tracking technology to study young people’s responses to visual stimuli, with a quantitative questionnaire to measure their self-reported alcohol consumption and their attitudes towards alcohol, and qualitative follow-up interviews with selected study participants. There is a significant negative relationship between level of alcohol consumption and intention to reduce drinking behaviour in the future. The anti-alcohol advertisements got low positive evaluations and a substantial proportion of the participants did not notice them. It was found that these advertisements are more positively evaluated when combined with user-generated images of young people socialising with alcohol compared to young people socialising without alcohol.