In Western democracies, citizens are advised by governments to manage their bodily practices in highly specific ways. There are guidelines for healthy eating, alcohol consumption, exercise and screen time. However, most research works suggest that there is a substantial gap between the guidelines and the ways in which most people live their lives. How can we make sense of this disconnect between the guidelines and everyday life? In this article, I discuss Australian healthy eating and healthy drinking guidelines. I argue that the guidelines invite us to manage our bodies in an idealised, individualised world where lifestyle change is a straightforward matter of putting knowledge into practice. Instead, we inhabit complex social worlds where food and alcohol are central to social life, and the enactment of our social identities and key social practices. Citizens do actively manage their food and alcohol consumption in an effort to be healthy, but they do so from a context where ‘social well-being’ is the primary aim. On the basis of current public health practice, it seems the guidelines will remain central to public health knowledge and funding claims but increasingly disconnected and irrelevant to citizens who inhabit contextualised social worlds.

The research literature on triangulation has paid little attention to the problematic of 'making sense of dissonant data'. Nor has there been much discussion around the use of the technique of triangulation when researching families. Through a presentation of research findings gathered from self-report questionnaires and in-depth interviews with couples and families the possibilities of convergent, complementary and dissonant data and their interpretation are explored. The paper reflects on the ontological, epistemological and methodological tensions that must be negotiated when working with triangulated data. It is argued that given the multi-faceted context and intimate subject matter in family and couples research there is a high likelihood of dissonant findings. Recommendations are made for family researchers interested in the technique of triangulation to consider the context and process of their research in the interpretation of their data. Despite the challenges that triangulation throws up for researchers, it is argued that working within a post-positivist paradigm, triangulation enables analysis which is both more complex and more meaningful.

Problematic alcohol consumption is a major public health, health education and health promotion issue in Australia and internationally. In an effort to better understand young people's drinking patterns and motivations we investigated the cultural drivers of drinking in 14–24 year-old Australians. We interviewed 60 young people in the state of Victoria aged 20–24 about their drinking biographies. At the time of interviewing, the draft guidelines on low-risk drinking were released by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia, and we asked our participants what they knew about them and if they thought they would affect their drinking patterns. Their responses indicate that pleasure and sociability are central to young people's drinking cultures which is supported by a range of research. However, O’Malley and Valverde claim that pleasure is silenced and/or deployed strategically in neo-liberal governance discourses about drugs and alcohol such as these guidelines which raises questions about the limits of such discourses to affect changes in drinking patterns.