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Sammanfattning

Young males and females aged 20 from different social groups who live in different parts of Sweden were interviewed with a focus group methodology. The groups were formed by various friendship networks. As alcohol consumption has increased steeply in this age group during the past few years, our aim was to examine the ways in which young people informally reason about alcohol. This sub-study shows how they communicate their experiences of occasional excessive drinking in the form of stories. The value systems underlying the stories are studied by analysing the accounts offered for excessive drinking. The moral conveyed by the stories is that those who drink too much risk being regarded as morally questionable in our culture. At the same time, the extent to which the listeners accept the accounts shows the conditions under which this kind of behaviour can be met with understanding and seen as an involuntary, reasonable reaction to an outer pressure or other circumstances that the storyteller cannot control.

MeSH