Sök artiklar i SveMed+

Tidskrift

Sammanfattning

AIM: The paper examines teenage alcohol use from an intergenerational perspective through an ethnographic case study of interaction between teenagers and adults. METHODS: Two periods of ethnographic fieldwork were conducted in a rural Danish community of approximately 6000 inhabitants. The fieldwork included 50 days of participant observation among 13-16-year-olds (n=93) as well as semistructured interviews with small selfselected friendship groups. The present paper presents an analysis of field notes from a night of participant observation that is used as an emblematic example of informants’ alcohol use and their interaction with adults. Theoretically, the paper adopts French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s conceptual framework for understanding the practice of everyday life, in particular his distinction between strategic and tactical action. RESULTS: Two scenarios are described and taken to represent two different adult approaches to teenage drinking. In Scenario I, adults accept a group of teenagers’ drinking in the home, and in Scenario II adults create an alcohol-free space which they guard against the intrusion of intoxicated teenagers. In both cases, however, adults use their intergenerational position in order to strategically contain teenage drinking. Meanwhile, teenagers act tactically by adjusting their alcohol use in time and space. Further, the use of alcohol marks a shift in the interaction between adults and teenagers in so far as it enables teenagers to create and control a place of their own and hence signal their independence from adults. CONCLUSION: The paper points to the creative, tactical agency of teenagers in response to adult strategies. It is illustrated how teenage alcohol use becomes a transformative factor for adult-teenager relationships, and in particular how teenagers rework intergenerational power differences by taking on drinking.

MeSH