Margaretha Järvinen

The Biographical Illusion: Constructing Meaning in Qualitative Interviews

This article deals with qualitative interviews in a research project on alcohol abusers and with some of the negotiations—about the cause and effect, guilt, and responsibility—involved in these interviews. The aim of this article is to show that interviews are sites of knowledge production and that interviewees fashion their stories according to more or less distinct interpretive frameworks. To illustrate the processes of assigning competence to interviewees, three unsuccessful narratives are presented. One thesis of the article is that the assignment of competence to interviewees reflects the degree of correspondence between the narrator’s interpretive framework and the theoretical preunderstanding of the researcher.

Constructing maturity through alcohol experience–Focus group interviews with teenagers

Danish 14- and 15-year-olds are at the top of the European list when it comes to drinking and drunkenness. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the struggle for social recognition–with alcohol as the central marker–transpires in groups of teenagers in Denmark. This article shows how alcohol experience and positive attitudes towards drinking are related to popularity and influence in the peer group. The function of alcohol in teenagers’ struggle for recognition is so strong that the participants who drink very little or not at all are put under considerable pressure. With alcohol as a central marker of maturity–and the drinking teenagers’ parents described as supporters of this view–non-drinking teenagers come out as the potential losers in the negotiation of status in the groups. The data are drawn from a large qualitative study in which 28 focus group interviews were conducted with Danish teenagers. This article represents a close reading of two of the interviews. Theoretically, the analysis is inspired by symbolic interactionism, Erwin Goffmans dramaturgical approach to social interaction and the post-structuralist reasoning of Judith Butler.

Teenage Drinking, Symbolic Capital and Distinction

This article analyses alcohol-related lifestyles among Danish teenagers. Building on Bourdieus reasoning on symbolic capital and distinction, we analyse three interrelated themes. First, we show that alcohol-related variables (drinking patterns, drinking debut, experience of intoxication, etc.) can be used to identify some very distinctive life styles among groups of Danish teenagers. Second, alcohol experience is analysed as a form of symbolic capital among youths, meaning that experience with drinking/partying is decisive for individual teenagers’ position and prestige in the peer group. Third, the article shows that distinction between different drinking patterns is not only a positive phenomenon related to group cohesiveness but also a negative phenomenon related to social dissociation and potential marginalisation of some youngsters. The data used in the article are both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative data come from a survey with a representative sample of 2000 Danish teenagers aged 15–16 (born in 1989). The qualitative data consist of 28 focus group interviews with teenagers in the eighth and ninth grades in different parts of Denmark.

Social capital as norms and resources: Focus groups discussing alcohol

The aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between peer-group social capital and the use of alcohol among young people – as this relationship is expressed in focus group interviews. The main point to be made is that social capital affects alcohol use in two different ways: it incites some forms of drinking (‘controlled drunkenness’) while restricting others (drinking alone, drinking ‘for the wrong reason’, losing control often). Furthermore, the idea behind this article is that social capital is both a background factor influencing participants’ relationship to alcohol and an effect of their drinking experience. We apply Colemans micro-oriented perspective on local network mechanisms – with a specific focus on collective norms negotiated in the focus groups – in combination with Bourdieus definition of social capital as resources. The data used in this article come from focus group interviews with 18–19-year-old Danes.

From recreational to regular drug use: qualitative interviews with young clubbers

This article analyses the process of going from recreational use to regular and problematic use of illegal drugs. We present a model containing six career contingencies relevant for young peoples progress from recreational to regular drug use: the closing of social networks, changes in forms of parties, intoxication becoming a goal in itself, easier access to drugs, learning to recognise alternative effects of drugs and experiences of loss of control. The analysis shows that these dimensions are at play not only when young people develop a regular drug use pattern but also when they attempt to extricate themselves from this pattern. Hence, when regular drug users talk about their future, it is not a future characterised by total abstinence from illegal drugs but a future where they have rolled back their drug use career to the recreational drug use pattern they started out with. Empirically, the article is based on qualitative interviews with young drug users contacted at nightclubs in Denmark.

Drinking Rituals and Drinking Problems in a Wet Culture

This paper discusses the drinking habits and the development of drinking problems in a group of alcohol abusers in Copenhangen. The paper is set within a framework of ritual theory, inspired by the Durkheim–Goffman tradition – and by more recent alcohol studies using a ritual theoretical approach (e.g., Gusfield, 1987; Pedersen, 1992; Elmeland, 1996). The focal concern is with ‘‘heavy alcoholics’’, i.e., people with a long career of substance abuse and with alcohol-related social and health problems. The project involved qualitative, semi-structured interviews with a total of 54 alcohol abusers: 39 men and 15 women. The interviewees were recruited from alcohol treatment institutions (outpatient units, psychiatric hospital wards, treatment homes) and institutions for the homeless in Copenhagen. The average age in the group was 47.2 years; 75% were aged between 40 and 55 years. Also included in the study were interviews with ‘‘key informants’’ among staff at these institutions. Danish alcohol culture may be characterised as relatively ‘‘wet’’. International comparisons place Denmark (together with France and Portugal) among the leading alcohol consumption countries in the European Union (Leifman, 2001). The aggregate alcohol consumption in Denmark (among persons over 14 years) was 12 liters

The Making of the Chronic Addict

Inspired by social problems theory, this article analyzes the “formula story” of harm reduction in a Danish addiction-treatment context. In Denmark, very few opiate addicts are in drug-free therapeutic treatment. Instead, they are offered methadone (often on a permanent basis) accompanied by practical help in tackling the negative social, economic, and health-related consequences of their drug use. The aim of this article is to show how the formula story of harm reduction—and first and foremost the idea that opiate addiction is an incurable condition—tends to work as a self-fulfilling prophesy. Opiate addicts entering the treatment system risk being “made up” as chronic addicts regardless of how they themselves look upon their own addiction problem and notwithstanding that many of them have not given up their hope of becoming drug-free. The article is based on two types of data: (1) file records (gathered in 2007) describing the addiction problems and treatment careers of clients enrolled at outpatient treatment centers in Copenhagen, and (2) qualitative interviews (conducted in 2006) with 30 methadone-program participants at the centers. The analysis is qualitative and the empirical results cannot necessarily be generalized to other methadone-maintenance programs. Yet the theoretical message of the article is applicable to all treatment institutions and social problems work in general. Definitions and categorizations of clients are not innocent, and naming people and their problems is the same as changing them.

Drinking successfully: Alcohol consumption, taste and social status

The paper analyses the relationship between social status, alcohol consumption and taste, using a Danish company as empirical case. Methodologically as well as theoretically, the paper is inspired by Bourdieu. A social space tied to socioeconomic status and gendered work positions is constructed using specific multiple correspondence analysis. Hereafter, a range of variables measuring alcohol-related practices and preferences are analysed, showing that specific drinking styles and alcohol preferences are associated with specific positions in the company’s status space. An omnivorous drinking style, embracing a broad variety of beverage types, drinking contexts and drinking companions is associated with high positions in the firm, as are specific types of drinks and specific reasons for drinking. The paper discusses drinking patterns as both a reflection of and a contribution to social status differences.

A will to health? Drinking, risk and social class

This article explores risk conceptions related to alcohol use among Danes who drink ‘too much’ (based on the National Health Board’s standards for safe drinking). It analyses drinking patterns and risk management strategies among interviewees from different socio-economic backgrounds, and explores the differences between the behaviours and conceptions of these individuals and the risk advice and definitions provided by health agencies. The article shows that people from different socio-economic backgrounds respond differently to the neo-liberal strategy of alcohol risk minimisation, with middle- and upper-class participants being more in tune with the public health ethos of alcohol consumer ‘autonomisation’ and ‘responsibilisation’. Cutting across socio-economic differences, though, are risk conceptions that clash with the public health model of risk prevention. While the risk communication of the health agencies builds on the logic of ‘a will to health’, drinkers at relatively high consumption levels tend to prefer other rationales, associating alcohol use with socialisation, pleasure and relaxation, and defining alcohol risks in terms of ‘addiction’ rather than detrimental health effects. The article contributes to the discussion of the ‘prevention paradox’, showing that rational initiatives at a general population level are not always comprehended as such at the individual level.

Dangers and pleasures: Drug attitudes and experiences among young people

This is a study of young people’s conceptions of illegal drug use as dangerous and/or pleasurable and an analysis of the relationship between attitudes to drugs, drinking, friends’ reported drug use and own experience with drug use and drinking. The article applies a mixed methods approach using both survey data and focus group interviews. The main statistical method is Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), which constructs a social space of young people’s attitudes to drugs and drug experiences relationally. We identify four interrelated positions on illegal drug use among 17 to 19-year-old Danes: the anti-drug position, usually held by youths who do not use illegal drugs and do not have drug-using friends; the ambivalent position, occupied by non-users who report that they have drug-using friends; the transitory position, held by cannabis users, some of whom express positive attitudes to ‘hard’ illegal drugs; and, finally, the pro-drug position, characteristic of drug users with low risk perceptions and high pleasure-orientation. We use the focus group interviews to demonstrate how youths occupying these differing positions argue for and against drugs and which risks and pleasures they associate with drug use.