Recent surveys have found a strong decrease in alcohol consumption among young people and this trend has been identified in European countries, Australia and North America. Previous research suggests that the decline in alcohol consumption may be explained by changes in parenting style, increased use of social media, changes in gender identities or a health and fitness trend. We use qualitative interviews with drinking and non-drinking young people from Sweden (N = 49) to explore in what way and in what kinds of contexts these explanations may hold true and how they alone or together may explain declining alcohol consumption among young people. By using the pragmatist approach, we pay attention to what kinds of concerns, habits, practices, situations and meanings our interviewees relate to adolescents' low alcohol consumption or decline in drinking. By analyzing these matters, we aim to specify the social mechanisms that have reduced adolescents' drinking. Our paper discovers social mechanisms similar to previous studies but also a few that have previously been overlooked. We propose that the cultural position of drinking may have changed among young people so that drinking has lost its unquestioned symbolic power as a rite of passage into adulthood. There is less peer pressure to drink and more room for competing activities. This opening of a homogeneous drinking culture to the acceptance of differences may function as a social mechanism that increases the success of other social mechanisms to reduce adolescents' drinking. Furthermore, the results of the paper suggest a hypothesis of the early maturation of young people as more individualized, responsible, reflective, and adult-like actors than in earlier generations. Overall, the paper provides hypotheses for future quantitative studies to examine the prevalence and distribution of the identified social mechanisms, as well as recommends directions for developing effective interventions to support young people's healthy lifestyle choices.

The article examines the interplay between the practices of heavy drinking and exercise among young people. The comparison helps to clarify why young people are currently drinking less than earlier and how the health-related discourses and activities are modifying young people's heavy drinking practices. The data is based on interviews (n = 56) in Sweden among 15-17-year-olds and 18-19-year-olds. By drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital, we examine what kinds of resources young people accumulate in the fields of heavy drinking and exercise, how these resources carry symbolic value for distinction, and what kind of health-related habitus they imply. The analysis shows that young people's practices in the social spaces of intoxication and exercise are patterned around the 'social health' and 'physical health' approaches and shaped by gendered binaries of masculine dominance. The 'physical health' approach values capable, high-performative, and attractive bodies, whereas the 'social health' approach is oriented towards accumulating social capital. The analysis demonstrates that these approaches affect the interviewees' everyday life practices so that the 'physical health' approach has more power over the 'social health' approach in transforming them. As the 'physical health' approach appears to modify young people's practices of drinking to be less oriented to intoxication or away from drinking, this may partly explain why young people are drinking less today than earlier. Compared to drinking, the physical health-related social spaces also seem to provide more powerful arenas within which to bolster one's masculine and feminine habitus. This further suggests that intoxication may have lost its symbolic power among young people as a cool activity signalling autonomy, maturity, and transgression of norms.

Since the 2000s, there has been a worldwide trend of decreased alcohol consumption among young people. Although recent studies have given multiple explanations for this, we know little about the meaning of alcohol for this generation as they enter adulthood. The aim of this article is therefore to describe and analyze the age-related views toward alcohol among this group as they transition from adolescents to adults. The study was based on 39 qualitative interviews with people aged 17–21. Theoretical concepts such as doing age and symbolic boundaries were used to analyze the material and investigate how age can structure alcohol use, and how alcohol consumption can be narrated to produce maturity and adulthood. The analysis showed that participants presented their relation to alcohol in nuanced and responsible ways, signaling maturity. The participants’ navigation of acceptable alcohol consumption differs in terms of agency and control in different life phases. ‘Doing adulthood’ in relation to alcohol for abstainers and drinkers seems to center on the same understandings of legitimate behavior: being moderate, nuanced, and in control. This focus linked alcohol to the position these emerging adults hold in wider society, given that participants incorporated societal demands for a neoliberal lifestyle.

Research shows that young people’s online practices have become a continuous, seamless and routine part of their physical and social worlds. Studies report contradictory findings on whether social media promotes intoxication-driven drinking cultures among young people or diminishes their alcohol consumption. By applying actor-network theory, our starting point is that the effects of social media depend on what kinds of concerns mediate its use. Social media alone cannot make young people drink more or less but influences their drinking in relation to specific attachments that we call here ‘assemblages’. The data consist of individual interviews among girls (n = 32) and boys (n = 24) between 15 and 19 years old from Sweden, covering topics such as alcohol use, social media habits and leisure time activities. The paper maps the variety of assemblages that mediate young people’s online practices and analyzes how young people’s drinking-related social media assemblages increase, decrease or exclude their alcohol consumption. The analysis shows that social media-related attachments seem to reduce our interviewees’ use of alcohol by providing competing activities, by transforming their drinking under the public eye, by reorganizing their party rituals to be less oriented towards drinking and by facilitating parents’ monitoring of their drinking situations.

Background: Gambling participation and problems change over time and are influenced by a variety of individual and contextual factors. However, gambling research has only to a small extent studied gamblers’ own perceptions of transitions in and out of problem gambling. Method: Qualitative telephone interviews were made with 40 gamblers who had repeatedly participated in the Swelogs Swedish Longitudinal Gambling Study. The framework approach was used for analyses, resulting in a multiple-linkage typology. Results: Our analyses revealed four configurations of gambling: (a) stable low frequency with no or minor harm, (b) decreasing high frequency with occasional harm, (c) fluctuating with moderate harm, and (d) increasing high frequency with substantial harm. Natural recovery and return to previous levels of gambling intensity were common. Change occurred either gradually, as a result of adjustment to altered personal circumstances, or drastically as a consequence of determined decisions to change. Personal and contextual factors such as psychological well-being, supportive relationships, and meaningful leisure activities played a part in overcoming harmful gambling and keeping gambling on a non-problematic level. Gambling advertising was commonly perceived as aggressive and triggering. Conclusions: The experience of harm is highly subjective, which should be taken into account when developing preventive measures. Considering the fluid character of gambling problems, help and support should be easily accessible and diversified. To repeatedly be interviewed about gambling and its consequences can contribute to increased reflection on, and awareness of, one’s own behaviours and the societal impacts of gambling.