Christine Griffin

University of Bath | UB · Department of Psychology

From the early days of hippie counter-culture, music festivals have been an important part of the British summer. Today they are commercialised offerings without the counter-cultural discourse of earlier times. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and focus groups conducted at a rock festival and a smaller boutique festival, the paper exa...

Background: Young adults are highly-active users of social network sites such as Facebook for their everyday friendship socializing. Alcohol companies have strategically used Facebook to embed their alcohol marketing into young adults’ social networking friendship activities, blurring the lines between user and alcohol brand generated content. This...

Young adults regularly engage in heavy drinking episodes with friends and share these practices via digital images and ongoing interactions on social media. This study explored the meanings and values that young adults attach to Facebook social media photo-sharing practices around drinking and socializing, and how these practices were gendered, in...

In this article, we explore the notion of freedom as a form of governance within contemporary consumer culture in a sphere where ‘freedom’ appears as a key component: outdoor music-based leisure events, notably music festivals and free parties. ‘Freedom’ is commodified as central to the marketing of many music festivals, which now form a highly com...

Young people are often accused of being foolhardy for posting photos on Facebook that depict drinking and intoxication. However, in this article, we argue young people’s predilection for posting Facebook drinking photos must be understood in relation to Facebook’s specific architecture and affordances, and is symptomatic of new forms of online soci...

New Zealand, similar to many other westernised nations, has a well-developed national culture of drinking to intoxication. Within this cultural context, young women are exhorted to engage with the night time economy, get drunk and have “fun” without relinquishing claims to “respectability”. More recently, the rise of Facebook and other social netwo...

Young people are often accused of being foolhardy for posting photos on Facebook that depict drinking and intoxication. However, in this article, we argue young people’s predilection for posting Facebook drinking photos must be understood in relation to Facebook’s specific architecture and affordances, and is symptomatic of new forms of online soci...

This article reports on a discussion with a group of qualitative researchers working with digital and online research. The conversation took as its starting point the social and technological changes that make distinctions between on and off line selves increasingly irrelevant. Through this lens the group considered the distinctive contribution of...

Our New Zealand-based research provides new insights, drawn from focus group and interview data gathered from 18- to 25-year-olds, about how alcohol use and technology converge in drinking and drunkenness while online. Alcohol consumption is a key source of harm and damage to population health, particularly for young people whose engagement with we...

The practice of pre-loading—drinking large amounts of alcohol rapidly in private spaces prior to socialising in the night-time economy—has come to notice recently in the study of alcohol-related harm, but no studies have explored these phenomena in Aotearoa New Zealand. We used a theoretical framework developed with public health alcohol studies fo...

This paper investigates young women's alcohol consumption in the United Kingdom within a widespread culture of intoxication in relation to recent debates about postfeminism and contemporary femininity. Young women are faced with an "impossible dilemma," arising from the contradiction between a hedonistic discourse of alcohol consumption and postfem...

The concept of social class has not featured as prominently in psychology as it has in the broader social sciences. This editorial provides an overview of the concept of social class and its relevance to contemporary psychology. Although far from exhaustive, the editorial considers key developments in class theory and research, paying particular at...

Understandings of health behaviors can be enriched by using innovative qualitative research designs. We illustrate this with a project that used multiple qualitative methods to explore the confluence of young adults' drinking behaviors and social networking practices in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Participants were 18-25 year old males and females from...

This research makes a new contribution to alcohol policy practice and theory by demonstrating that transgression of officially sanctioned norms and values is a key component of the sub- and counter-cultural drinking practices of some groups of young consumers. Therefore, policy messages that proscribe these drinking practices with moral force are l...

Consuming alcohol to intoxication is a commonplace leisure-time activity among young people in Aotearoa New Zealand, producing a formidable suite of harms and consequences that are proving challenging to redress. Youth drinking cultures are similar to those observed in Western Europe, where processes of globalization are increasingly “homogenizing”...

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of ‘excessive’ white heterosexual working-class femininity as a ‘constitutive limit’ of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neo-liberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that cons...

Young people's drinking practices have recently become the focus for a sustained and pervasive discourse of moral panic in the arenas of social policy, academic research and popular culture. There is now a considerable body of research on young people's alcohol consumption, especially 'underage' or other 'problem' drinking, much of which has used l...

Across the Western world many young people are increasingly involved in normalised practices around heavy drinking, which they view as pleasurable, involving fun and being sociable (Lyons & Willot, 2008; McCreanor et al., 2005; Szmigin et al., 2008). Researchers have documented a range of factors that have contributed to this development, including...

Young adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within a collective culture of intoxication to ‘have fun’ and ‘be sociable’. This population has also rapidly increased their use of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/ video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to...

In the second half of the 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS)1 at Birmingham University produced a series of highly influential texts on the relationship between (predominantly white, male, working class, heterosexual, British) youth and popular culture. Texts by Hall and Jefferson (1975), Hebdige (1979), Willis (19...

This chapter examines the idea that alongside a decline in traditional forms of political participation, new forms of political participation are emerging within the realm of leisure. Exploring these ideas through theories of neoliberalism and neo-tribalism, we report an empirical analysis of ethnographic observations, interviews and focus groups w...

The British Citizenship Test was introduced in 2005 as one of a raft of new procedures aimed at addressing the perceived problems of integration and social cohesion in migrant communities. In this study, we argue that this new citizenship procedure signals a shift in British political discourse about citizenship - particularly, the institutionaliza...

This paper contributes to debates on post-feminism and the constitution of contemporary femininity via an exploration of young women’s alcohol consumption and their involvement in normative drinking cultures. We view femininity as a profoundly contradictory and dilemmatic space which appears almost impossible for girls or young women to inhabit. Th...

Gender inequalities in schools have implications for life chances, emotional well-being and educational policies and practices, but are apparently resistant to change. This paper employs Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of performativity in a study of young people and consumption to provide insights into gendered inequities. It argues that how the...

Negotiating access to participants poses challenges for all social research, but this can be particularly exacting in ethnographic projects which require participants to consent to prolonged research encounters that can be invasive or disruptive of their social lives. The process is more difficult still when accessing social groups that are already...

University students’ alcohol and drug use is a public health concern. This study explored the consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs and their impacts on wellbeing at the Universities of Bath and Bristol in 2012, using a combination of an on-line survey, focus groups and individual interviews. A total of 843 students completed the questionnaire,...

Alcohol consumption and heavy drinking in young adults have been key concerns for public health. Alcohol marketing is an important factor in contributing to negative outcomes. The rapid growth in the use of new social networking technologies raises new issues regarding alcohol marketing, as well as potential impacts on alcohol cultures more general...

In this paper we use Bakhtin’s theory of carnival in a literary analysis of young peoples’ accounts of the role of alcohol in their social lives. Bakhtinian themes in the focus group transcripts included the dialogic character of drinking stories, the focus on parodic grotesquery, ribald and satiric laughter, and the temporary subversion and revers...

This chapter explores some of the ethical challenges posed by digital ethnography as an innovative methodology for conducting online research. Digital ethnography shares many of the principles of traditional (offline) ethnography, including an ethnographic commitment to understanding participants’ lives and experiences through observation and activ...

Purpose Social marketing initiatives designed to address the UK's culture of unhealthy levels of drinking among young adults have achieved inconclusive results to date. The paper aims to investigate the gap between young people's perceptions of alcohol consumption and those of government agencies who seek to influence their behaviour set within a c...

This paper revisits the work on youth cultures and subcultures that emerged from Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS) during the 1970s. I engage with a number of recent critiques of the 'youth sub/cultures project', including Thornton's influential work on rave and club cultures and its troubled engagement with cla...

In this chapter, we reflect on the discourses of deficit theme in the context of our study of young people and alcohol in the UK, and in light of the way the UK’s alcohol problem is constituted in public policy discourse. We chose one policy document in particular because it came directly from the UK Government cabinet office and focused prominentl...

Between 2002 and 2005 fresh or unprepared psilocin-based 'magic' mushrooms were legal to possess and traffic in the UK, and commercial sales demonstrated a significant market for this hallucinogenic drug. During and after this time there has been relatively little analysis concerning how magic mushroom users accounted for their drug use, nor on the...

This article argues that youth cultural leisure and consumption practices have the potential to be sites for alternative political participation, an ‘everyday politics’ that involves a personalizing of politics and an ‘aloof ’ stance regarding official institutions. Drawing on the work of Harris (2001) and Maffesoli (1996), the article outlines the...

In this article, we explore the potential for leisure as a site for new forms of political participation. Using electronic dance music culture (EDMC) as an example, we locate our analysis within theories of neo-liberalism and neo-tribalism, both of which suggest that political participation may be occurring at an informal level through consumption....

Strategies aimed at reducing land use conflict often stress the need to make planning decisions more democratic. However, this goal is obstructed by overly-narrow conceptual perspectives that neglect the symbolic significance of place. We illustrate this by examining place names, which function as repositories of socio-political meaning. Drawing on...

Drinking to intoxication now forms an increasingly normalised part of most young people’s social lives. Research on young people’s alcohol consumption indicates a pattern of increased sessional heavy drinking in the UK from the early 1990s, although there is some recent evidence that this trend is starting to level off (Measham, 2008). We have expl...

This article examines the multiple and contradictory understandings that participants of a free party (rave) scene in the South West of England drew upon when talking about ketamine, and the role of these understandings in identity and consumption practices. The data is drawn from 19 semi-structured interviews and one focus group conducted in two p...

In this article, we critically reflect on the constitution of the UK's alcohol problem in the government's ‘Safe, Social, Sensible’ policy document, referring to findings from a 3-year ESRC funded study on young people, alcohol and identity. We suggest that discursive themes running throughout ‘Safe, Sensible, Social’ include ‘shared responsibility...

Young people’s alcohol consumption has been the focus of heightened concern over ‘binge drinking’ in social policy, academic research and popular culture. A normalised culture of intoxication is now central to many young people’s social lives, playing an important role in the night-time economy of towns and cities across the UK. In this paper we dr...

This paper discusses the advantages and challenges of using qualitative methods to elicit poor children’s perspectives about threats and positive influences on their wellbeing. It draws on research carried out by the author on the subjective experiences of poor children in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia in terms of their understandings of wel...

Abstract „Konsumkultur und Männlichkeiten: Überschneidungen von Gender und Peer-Kulturen in alltäglichen Schulroutinen“

The article examines the use of photo-elicitation methods in an ESRC-funded study of young consumers. Participants were asked to take photographs of consumer items that were significant to them. These were subsequently used in recorded interviews as a trigger to elicit the discussion of the relationship between consumer goods and identity. The anal...

Background: Between 2002 and 2005 fresh or unprepared psilocin-based 'magic' mushrooms were legal to possess and traffic in the UK, and commercial sales demonstrated a significant market for this hallu-cinogenic drug. During and after this time there has been relatively little analysis concerning how magic mushroom users accounted for their drug us...

Purpose The paper seeks to offer a critique of the Piagetian developmental cognitive psychology model which dominates research into children and brand symbolism, and to propose consumer culture theory as an alternative approach. The paper also aims to present the design and interpretation of an empirical study into the roles brands play in the ever...

This paper explores some of the subtle and complex roles which consumption culture may play in the moral development of children. We concentrate on the role of commodified celebrities in children's understanding of moral questions, taking English soccer hero David Beckham as an example. We address three questions: first, how do children draw on cel...

Background: Recent debates on 'binge drinking' in the UK have represented the activities of young drinkers in urban areas as a particular source of concern, as constituting a threat to law and order, a drain on public health and welfare services and as a source of risk to their own future health and well being. The discourse of moral panic around...

This paper explores how motorcars and car-based cultural practices operate in the construction of young working-class masculine identities. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2002 with young male car modifiers from the Midlands and North Wales who associated with the British cruising scene. Although this study is broa...

In BDBT I engage with 'an argument in favour of the analysis of ''naturally occurring talk'' (or 'naturalistic records') in preference to material derived from research interviews or ethnographic observation, and a related argument in favour of discursive psychology approaches (henceforth DP) derived from conversation analysis (henceforth CA) as th...

Qualitative research in psychology has tended to draw on a relatively narrow range of research methods, and the recent shift towards the analysis of material involving `naturally occurring talk' in some areas of psychology has reinforced this trend. This article discusses the implications of a preference for the analysis of `naturally occurring tal...

Recent studies of youth culture suggest that consumption is central to the construction of adolescent identities. Many of these studies have focused on the links between consumption, style and identity, and have concluded that style is a crucial means of sustaining and defining group boundaries. Drawing on a series of group interviews with young pe...

Many young people enjoy alcohol consumption as part of their social lives, but recently there has been increased concern regarding the amount they drink and how they behave in public places when intoxicated. So called 'binge' drinking has become a particular concern in the UK. Such drinking behaviour is often positioned in opposition to 'normal' dr...

Following a review of the main approaches to the study of class in the social sciences, a critical/discursive approach is adopted to show how analysing an aspect of everyday life such as leisure and 'going out' can reveal the reproduction of dominant discourses about class. Forty-two middle-class young adults were taken on 'nights out' to bars and...

This study is of a grounded theory analysis of the transcripts of young men talking about their experience of psychosis. Six young men were interviewed twice during the critical period of 3-5 years following their first psychotic episode. The young men were asked to reflect on themselves and their lives before, during, and after having psychotic ex...

This exploratory study involved the qualitative analysis of the responses of eight children with atypical gender identity organization to open-ended questions about their experiences of secondary school. The aim was to develop an understanding of these young people's interaction with their peers. It became apparent that all but one of the participa...

In this article the constraints on identity change for a group of working class men experiencing long-term unemployment in the UK is examined. Despite their lack of access to paid employment, these men continued to construct their gender identity around the breadwinner persona. The theoretical framework employed concepts from both Connell and Bourd...

Authenticity or `being true to the self' continues to be a culturally valued quality despite (or perhaps because of) the increasing fragmentation of identities in contemporary culture. Focusing on accounts of the lesbian and gay `scene' of bars and clubs in Birmingham, UK, we discuss how young people employ a discourse of authenticity when talking...

This article reports on a qualitative social constructionist analysis that aims to examine the ways in which menopause and women's bodies are represented in self-help texts. In particular, we aim to compare texts with a more traditional 'medical' approach and others taking a more 'woman-centred' perspective. Four diverse self-help books on menopaus...

This article looks at the diagnosis of gender identity disorder (child and adolescent criteria) as used in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). It considers how gender identity disorder came to be in the fourth edition, and explores some of the problematic aspects of the DSM-IV criteria. The authors argue that resea...

This paper explores the ways in which male offenders in professional-status occupations prior to conviction construct and justify money-related crime. We report a detailed analysis, based in grounded theory and critical social-psychological discourse analysis, of a loosely-structured group interview with four offenders. The men constructed justific...

Research approaches to `youth' and `adolescence' in many disciplines have been shaped by the western construction of adolescence as a period of inevitable `Storm and Stress', although researchers in anthropology and cultural studies have questioned the value of this model. British research on youth cultures and subcultures during the 1970s presente...

This paper presents a discourse analysis of parents' talk about the knowledge, expertise and authority of professionals, during assessment and diagnosis of their child for an autistic spectrum disorder at a Child Development Centre. Focusing on the positional level of analysis, it was suggested that parents' constructions of professional expertise...

An analysis is presented of the various discourses through which the recent debate over boys’ ‘underachievement’ in school was constituted in the British broadsheet newspapers, in academic research, and in the statements of politicians and policy makers during the late 1990s. A number of academic commentators have argued that the debate over boys’...

This article reviews recent research on young women’s friendship groups in western societies, arguing that much of this work has relatively little to say about the sexual and erotic dimension of such relationships and the construction of young women’s sexualities. Research on young women’s lives often overlooks the possibility of same-sex female de...

The majority of studies on the effects of a diagnosis of learning disability in the family have employed traditional 'loss' and 'stress reaction' paradigms. In contrast to this approach, the current analysis employed a form of discourse analysis to explore the ways in which parents represented the 'problem' during the process of assessment of their...

This study examines the ways in which a group of working-class men serving custodial sentences and probation orders for money-related crimes talk about criminal activity and the implications of this talk for their gender identity. Using a critical social-psychological approach, we carried out nine semi-structured group discussions in probation cent...

This study evaluated levels of psychological distress experienced by children (aged 4–16) and parents at the beginning of and one month after mediation for child-related disputes. In contrast to previous research, this study employed both child- and parent-reports of child outcome. Mediation was associated with reductions in child-reported, though...

This article focuses on the representation of youth as a key moment of transition in contemporary western societies, set between the dependent state of childhood and the supposed maturity and independence of adult status. Young people are viewed as gendered, racialized and sexualized beings who also occupy specific class locations, and are assumed...

In contemporary society, being powerful is typically associated with, among other things, being male, middle class and employed. The cultural ascendancy of these characteristics is supported by specific structural and discursive patterns. However, there are a number of ways in which these cultural yardsticks can be challenged. In this paper we summ...

Extended review of: Cohen, P. (1997) Rethinking the Youth Question: Education, Labour and Cultural Studies. London: Macmillan. Furlong, A. and F. Cartmel (1997) Young People and Social Change: Individualisation and Late Modernity. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Roche, J. and S. Tucker (1996) Youth in Society: Contemporary Theor...

The dominant methodological approach in psychological research has involved the use of quantitative methods within a positivist framework. In this article we argue that both qualitative and quantitative methods have their strengths and limitations, depending on the research question under investigation. We examine some of the advantages of qualitat...

The present research reports the findings of a study assessing delinquency amongst British adolescents. The aim of the study was to investigate whether labelled and unlabelled delinquents differ in the patterns of their self-concept. Subjects were selected from secondary schools, educational guidance centers, and community homes. In total 360 label...