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There is some research evidence which suggests that drinking habits among Swedish-speaking Finns differ from those of Finnish-speaking Finns. The limited literature on this subject routinely lumps the minority of Swedish-speaking Finns into one single group. The assumption is that drinking habits in the Swedishspeaking population are less damaging to health than drinking habits in the Finnishspeaking majority. In this study we use data from the nationwide School Health Promotion Study, which in principle covers all pupils in the 8th and 9th grade of comprehensive school and the 1st and 2nd grade of upper secondary school. We chose to focus on two areas with a sufficiently large number of Swedish-speaking residents and, by tradition, different drinking habits, i.e. Ostrobothnia and the metropolitan Helsinki area. All in all, the data consist of 5,698 Swedish-speaking and 29,708 Finnish-speaking adolescents aged ca. 14-18. The results show that when the populations from the two areas are taken together, there are indeed differences between the two language groups. The almost ten-year downward trend in youthful drinking in Finland is clearly attributable to Finnish-speaking youth. Finlands svenskspråkiga - en sällan undersökt, annorlunda befolkningsgrupp Pekka Kuusi (1948) fäste för 60 år sedan uppmärksamhet vid skillnaderna mellan den svenskspråkiga och finskspråkiga befolkningens alkoholbruk i Finland. Han framhöll att det bland de svenskspråkiga "är betydligt mera sällsynt att betrakta sig som absolutist än i landet i gemen. Dessutom drack de svenskspråkiga alkohol oftare än genomsnittet. Skillnaderna gällde även ungdomar: de svenskspråkiga inledde sitt alkoholbruk klart tidigare än de finskspråkiga. (Ibid.) Kuusis iakttagelser har visserligen levt vidare i folkmun, men de har sällan prövats av forskningen". Då de svenskspråkigas dryckesvanor dessutom vanligtvis undersökts som en del av riksomfattande populationsstudier, har språkgruppen representerats av ett mycket litet antal respondenter. I Kuusis undersökning intervjuades ca 3 000 personer som fyllt 20 år. Av dem var ca 300 svenskspråkiga. När Jussi Simpura (1990) som nästa forskare grep sig an temat, använde han ett material som samlats in 1984 och bestod av 15-64-åriga finländare. Materialet omfattade ca 3 600 personer, varav Christoffer Tigerstedt Jaana Markkula Thomas Karlsson Jukka Jokela Minna Pietikäinen Finlands svenskspråkiga ungdomars dryckesvanor i Österbotten och huvudstadsregionen En jämförelse med finskspråkiga ungdomar Finlands svenskspråkiga ungdomars dryckesvanor i Österbotten och huvudstadsregionen This is also true for the reductions seen in frequent drinking and binge drinking. In a comparison of Ostrobothnia and the metropolitan Helsinki area, it turns out that the differences between Swedish-speaking youngsters are considerable: abstention, less frequent drinking and less binge drinking are clearly more prevalent in Ostrobothnia than in the Helsinki area. By comparison, the Finnishspeaking adolescents in the two regions differ less clearly from each other. Conspicuous subgroups within the Swedish-speaking minority are the binge drinking upper secondary students in the Helsinki area, the abstaining girls from comprehensive schools in the almost exclusively Swedishspeaking Ostrobothnian municipalities, and the abstaining youngsters from the "bible zone" in Ostrobothnia. In contrast to earlier findings, we found that in Ostrobothnia the drinking habits of the two language groups are quite similar.

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