This section details the methods used for this qualitative research enquiry. This is followed by a section detailing the recruitment of young people to the study and the data collection process including the rationale for group interviews and using content
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from social networking online sites (SNS). Finally, this section reflects on the ethical challenges encountered and an explanation of the data analysis strategy and process.
3.5.1 Research design
The study was an in-depth qualitative project in which data from young people’s narrative accounts given in group interviews and the content they posted on SNS relating to both their alcohol consumption and associated practices were collected and analysed. The study focuses on the drinking experiences of young people from deprived communities and it was this group of young people that were targeted for recruitment to the study. As with most qualitative studies, the empirical findings are specific to the research context though they provide useful insights into young people’s alcohol consumption practices at both a theoretical and conceptual level. The study findings also help to developing an understanding of the usefulness of social practice theory in researching these social practices.
3.5.2 Recruitment
Recruitment was undertaken via contacts known to the researcher, through a previous job role in health and social care applied research. The contacts acted as gatekeepers to groups of young people. Two of these contacts proved very productive; a tutor at a local college and a youth worker. Meetings were held with both individuals to discuss the research and identify ways in which the study might proceed with their help and approval. Access to venues and to meetings with groups of young people was negotiated and additional approvals, when required were sought. Arrangements were then made to meet with two to three friendship groups of young people at each venue to discuss the research. Three friendship groups of young people aged between
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sixteen and twenty-one years of age (twenty-three participants in total) subsequently agreed to take part in the study. Three friendship groups consisting of twenty-three young people were considered sufficient for the study as a large amount of data was generated from the social media content requiring intensive analytical work (Anderson 2010). In addition, Cresswell (2013) warns against including too many cases as the data can become unwieldy resulting in superficial analysis.
A purposive sample of young people was chosen as it was thought that a trusted gatekeeper acting as an introduction to groups of young people may help to alleviate any concerns they may have about participating in a research study. Some of the young people may have been concerned about admitting to under-age drinking or to other illicit activity and some may have been concerned about how their drinking practices maybe perceived by others. Despite the introduction from trusted gatekeepers’, attempts made to recruit some groups of young people were unsuccessful, with three groups who were spoken to, making the decision not to participate.
3.5.3 Recruitment sample
Young people were recruited to the study from vocational and apprenticeship courses at two training organisations, within the north of England, both of which were located within the 10% most deprived areas in England (DCLG 2010). Research has shown that young people on vocational education and apprenticeship courses delivered in deprived areas are likely to be from lower socio-economic groups (Whitfield and Wilson 1991, Payne 2001). Socio-economic status has in the main been defined by an individual’s position in the labour market, education status, home ownership, car ownership, social grade and/or income, which makes it extremely difficult to
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determine the socio-economic status of young people unless the study has access to parental information (WHO 2012b, Beard et al. 2016). This study did not have access to parental information and the young people were not asked to obtain this information as it was thought this may impact on the rapport established between the researcher and the groups (Thornton 1995). This purposive sampling approach instead draws on socially situated investigations (Rhodes 2009) which target recruitment to research based on a specific location and education level, with the presumption that individuals recruited in that specific area are likely to be from the desired target group. This approach draws on the work of other researchers that have applied a similar approach (Smith 2014, Hall and Winlow 2007). By way of an example, is a study by Crawshaw and Bunton (2009) who investigated the risk discourses of young working class men. The researchers targeted recruitment at young men who lived in an impoverished former industrial town thus achieving the desired objective of recruiting young men from working class backgrounds. The specific locations were chosen as the data shows that alcohol related problems and harms are greater in individuals from lower socio-economic groups (Marmot 1997). The study draws on the work of Skeggs (1997b) who advocates that gathering as much information as possible helps to make sense of participants’ positions. For this reason, this study sought information from SNS content and group discussion on relevant background information such as the participants’ home location, education, social networks and family backgrounds and from this data each participant was identified as being from a lower socio-economic status group. A more detailed description of the young people is given in section 4.4.
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3.5.4 Data collection process
Data were collected over a 14-month period, from July 2014 to September 2015. Three group interviews were undertaken with two of the groups and one group was interviewed four times during the data collection period. During this period the researcher also kept field notes based on initial impressions, thoughts on each of the discussions and any observations that were made about the participants (Braun and Clarke 2013). SNS content was collected from a variety of social media; Facebook3,
Twitter4 and Instagram5 depending on the favoured social media of each participant.
The young people agreed to allow the research project access to the SNS that they used with the exception of Snapchat6 which some of the young people denied the
project access to. Although some young people did agree to the project accessing their Snapchat there were two issues with including it as a data source, and therefore the decision was taken not to include it in the project. Firstly, the young people who had agreed to include their Snapchats could censor which posts to share with the project and secondly, the temporary nature of the content meant that data collection would have to be undertaken manually every 24 hours for the duration of the project. This was disappointing as Snapchat is thought by some researchers to have overtaken Facebook in terms of popularity with young people (Rushton 2015). The appeal of
3Facebook users develop a prolife and personal timeline on the website. Each user can link to family, friends, colleagues and
strangers through sending a ‘friend’ request or responding positively to a friend request. Each profile has a News Feed and timeline (formerly known as the wall), which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and posts of the user's friends. Posts are not space limited and can include photos and other visual images. Friends can ‘like’, ‘share’ or ‘comment’ on a post to show they have connected with it.
4Twitter is an online microblogging social media service. It enables users to send and receive short 140-character text messages
and or visual messages, called "tweets". Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags; words or phrases are prefixed with a "#" sign. Tweeters can tweet their own messages or can retweet messages from other users; the email equivalent of ‘forwarding’. Other users can designate tweets as ‘favourite’ to show they connect with a tweet. Users can connect to other users by ‘following’
5Instagram is an online mobile image sharing (photographs and video) social networking site. Users share images either publicly
or privately.
6Snapchat is a mobile app that allows users to send and receive images (photos and videos) that automatically disappear after a
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Snapchat is it is quick to use, it is intimate as you can choose who you share content with and exists only for a short moment in time (Madrigal 2013). This type of sharing means that content does not need to be as polished as other SNS where content is permanent, loggable and traceable (Madrigal 2013). Whilst not being able to see these posts and use those as data were undoubtedly a limitation of the research, discussions with the participants revealed the types of images and stories that were posted on this online media. Facebook content was collected every three or four weeks and involved accessing the Facebook timeline (formerly known as the wall) of each participant and converting the information to an adobe PDF document. This method was preferred to accessing data via the research profile newsfeed as Facebook controls and edits the information a user’s newsfeed receives (Facebook 2016c). Twitter and Instagram content was accessed via the research profile every three weeks and content was saved in a pdf format.
Each group interview took approximately one hour and each participant was invited to contact the researcher, following the interview, if they wished to add to anything further. In addition, one face-to-face interview with one young person who could not make the time of the final group interview was undertaken. The interviews produced in-depth narratives of the participants’ drinking practices. The SNS content provided a visual and narrative performance of the participants’ social lives that ran parallel to these accounts, providing additional data for the study and data that could be discussed further in the group interviews (Niland 2014, Atkinson et al. 2014).
When conducting group interviews a formal interview schedule was not used, but a list of topics was covered (time permitting) allowing participants to express
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themselves freely (Nairn and Spotswood 2015). This flexibility allowed the young people to share their drinking stories, enabled discussion of SNS content and enabled the researcher, to pick up and probe on points that were considered to be of importance. The resulting data offered the opportunity to explore the structure of their drinking practices.
3.5.5 Rationale for friendship group interviews
Silverman (2003) noted that interview accounts offer a cultural story about the participant’s social world. It is this cultural story of the practice performance that is of interest in revealing the constitutive elements that make up young people’s drinking practices, and to identify some of the different and various ways in which the practice is performed. Unearthing cultural stories about the practices, was considered to be an informative way of exploring the norms and elements that are constitutive of the practice. Indeed, interviews represent another performance of social life (Denzin 2001). Thus, interviews were considered to be a favourable data collection tool for this study.
The researcher was also mindful of research that has explored alcohol consumption experiences through the shared storytelling of research participants in group interviews (eg. Kitzinger 1994, Lyons and Willott 2008, Emslie et al. 2012). Young people’s drinking practices have been shown to be an activity, which in the main, is undertaken with friends (Seaman and Ikegwuonu 2010, Percy et al. 2011). It therefore makes sense to explore the practice within friendship groups of the young participants. An existing group of friends also have an established rapport and are likely to be more comfortable in sharing their experiences, contradicting each other, as well as having
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shared experiences to draw on (Lyons and Willott 2008, Niland 2014). Friendship group discussions may also encourage participation from people who may be reluctant to be interviewed on their own (Kitzinger 1995). Browne (2016) found that shared laughter and humour within group interviews could also be employed as a way of creating a safe place to talk about sensitive and shameful topics that is less likely in one-to-one interactions. This shared laughter and humour from the telling of amusing stories can help to cement the participant’s community of practice with group members co-authoring these stories (Haydock 2014c).
Group interviews offered this study the potential to uncover particular ideas of shared routines and cultural conventions, and identify challenges to these social norms through inconsistencies highlighted between participants. Group interviews also offered the study the potential to highlight the different performances of a practice, identify the materiality, meanings and knowledge (elements) of the practice, and the connectivity between these. Finally, group interviews also enable a reflection on the habitual practices and routines that underpin young people’s drinking practices. Talking to the study participants about their experiences of consuming alcohol was not challenging. As is noted later on in the thesis (Chapter 4), the storytelling of a night out is an important part of the accrual of capital, and as such there was no shortage of ‘stories’ among the participants. However as identified by other researchers, it was far more difficult to encourage a narrative of the routine (Nettleton and Green 2014, Spotswood et al. 2015). A narrative of routinised actions was encouraged by the telling of funny stories, the participants’ challenges of each other’s accounts and finally by
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the researcher challenging the participants to recall the smallest details and the taken- for-granted parts of a narrative.
The challenge for this thesis was to understand how risk relates to young people’s alcohol consumption and how they navigate and negotiate risk within these practices using the lens of social practice theory. In a theoretical point of departure from other studies which have sought to identify how young people perceive risk (Moloney et al. 2015, Mayock 2005), rather this study used the group discussions and peer challenge, to stimulate the participants’ own meaning or sense making of risk (Wall and Olofsson 2008). Thus interview questions intentionally refrained (where possible) from using the term ‘risk’ (Green 2009). Instead, questions and topic areas were related to the detail of their alcohol consumption practices.
Meeting with each friendship group, three or four times, was an opportunity for building rapport with the research participants and allowed both the participants and the researcher time between meetings to reflect on what we had previously discussed. The researcher was able to reflect on the participants’ talk and performance and develop the next set of topic areas around particular perhaps more mundane aspects of their drinking practices. In this way, the focus was on the elements of the practice identified as being worthy of more discussion, rather than listening to more funny stories or even the retelling of the same stories that had already been heard. Within two of the more established friendship groups in the study, the participants challenged each other’s views and occasionally even rejected outright the other’s assertions. However, there are limitations to this approach. Friendship groups can elicit conformity with some participants withholding things that they might not be
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comfortable talking about in a group (Morgan 1997:15). Furthermore, as the point of group discussion is that participants talk to each other, the researcher has little control over the interaction other than keeping the participants focused on the topic. This was certainly the case in this study. Sometimes participants so enjoyed the retelling of a story it was difficult to keep them on track, or in the case of one group, when other friends strolled in to the room joining in the story telling even though they were not part of the study.
It is also important to note that the researcher will have an effect on the interaction of the group and the performance of group members. Particularly relevant to this study is how the researcher is positioned by oneself and how they are positioned by the group. Position is conceptualised here as how the researcher’s moral and personal attributes and subjective approach to the topic are perceived (Reventlow and Tulinius 2005). It is likely that this researcher was positioned as a figure of authority by the participants and as such the researcher was aware that she needed to counter this by adopting a non-judgemental approach to the conversations. However it is impossible to neutralise the researcher effect altogether (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995) and in the context of the interview as performance it is not desirable either. It was therefore useful to try to understand how the researcher influenced the discussions.
3.5.6 Rationale for the use of SNS content
The use of SNS has rapidly been assimilated into contemporary society with research suggesting that users of these sites visit them frequently (Morgan et al. 2010, Joinson 2008, McCreanor et al. 2013, Atkinson et al. 2014), and that users are living their lives online and publicly on these sites (Subrahmanyam and Greenfield 2008). Content from
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SNS provided an additional data source exploring how young people performed their drinking practices to a wider social network in an online environment, and represented an alternative performance of the practice to that given in the group interviews (Drew and Guillemin 2014, Atkinson et al. 2014).
It is important to note that SNS content was not collected as an attempt to triangulate the data or with the aim of getting close to a truth (Braun and Clarke 2013). Rather, photographs, internet memes and postings provided an insight into the participants’ experiences of events at which the researcher was not present, and thus can be seen as a way of enhancing the research context (Martens 2012)7. The use of SNS as a data
source enhanced the scope of the study by providing a less obtrusive approach to the data collection (Hewson 2015). Although, there has been some resistance to the use of online content as a data source as some commentators have thought that people have a propensity to not be honest and authentic online, data from validation studies has shown this not to be the case (Hewson 2015).
Each young person was ‘friended’ and/or ’followed’ on the SNS they were users of and in this way the practice performances were captured on social media (for example, post-night out story telling; the performance of hangovers on Facebook). Friends on a SNS cannot be defined in the same way as more traditional understandings of the term friend. Instead Facebook combines all social relationships into one single category of Friend, including parents, work colleagues, casual acquaintances, romantic partners and friends of friends (Boyd 2010). The use of discussion groups combined with content taken from SNS as study data is not without precedent. A study of young
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women’s drinking norms in Australia undertaken by Brown and Glegg (2012) used this methodology as did more recent studies by Atkinson et al. (2014), Niland (2014), Hutton et al. (2016) and Moewaka Barnes et al. (2016). This type of data is congruent