Possibilities for Co-Creation in Adolescents’ Alcohol Prevention

Introduction

Adolescents’ alcohol consumption has been widely discussed and researched (e.g. Ander et al., 2017; Bakken et al., 2017; Hibell et al., 2015; Jørgensen et al., 2007; Page et al., 2008; Rolando & Katainen, 2014), as have different approaches to alcohol prevention (e.g. Cameron & Campo, 2006; Cheon, 2008; Elmeland & Kolind, 2012; Fagan et al., 2011). Although Hibell et al. (2015) note, on the basis of a pan-European survey, recent trends of decreasing lifetime consumption and previous 30-day consumption, adolescents still start using alcohol early and consume extensive amounts: almost half of 15-year olds reported using alcohol at the age of 13 or younger, and 13 per cent reported being intoxicated in the previous 30 days (Hibell et al., 2015). Prevention has included new approaches and has moved from individual-based techniques, such as planned behaviour theory (e.g. Ajzen, 1985) and social norms marketing (e.g. Perkins, 2002; Real & Rimal, 2007), to community-based prevention (e.g. Cheon, 2008; Fagan et al., 2011), which can be used to effectively decrease the amounts adolescents consume and to increase alcohol consumption onset age.

The current study focuses on capturing and using narratives for alcohol prevention and was carried out in Estonia, which has high alcohol consumption, similar to other Eastern European countries (Popova et al., 2007). The legal age for buying and consuming alcohol in Estonia is 18. However, on average Estonian adolescents’ first experience with alcohol happens between 12 and 15 years of age (Aasvee & Rahno, 2015; Eesti Konjunktuuriinstituut, 2011; Parder, 2011). Of 15-year olds, less than one-fifth reported that they had never drunk alcohol (Aasvee & Rahno, 2015), and adolescent alcohol consumption happens mostly at parties: celebrations or weekend binge drinking parties (Parder, 2011). Adolescents in Estonia engage in drunkenness at home in rural areas in dangerous ways (experimenting with alcohol and drinking to excess) (Trell et al., 2013), which makes alcohol prevention even more important in these areas.

In Estonia, there are several preventive measures carried out both for the overall society and for adolescents in particular. Alcohol policy focuses on restricting access (Saar, 2015), limiting the advertising of alcohol (Raudne, 2012), raising alcohol excise taxes, implementing nationwide sales restrictions and raising the effectiveness of police action (e.g. randomly breath-testing drivers and publicly campaigning against drunk driving). However, sixth graders report there are few preventive actions (e.g. lectures, seminars and films) provided for them (Paas, 2015).

There have only been a few studies on the Estonian alcohol-related party culture (e.g. Parder, 2016; Parder & Vihalemm, 2015). These studies conclude that, similar to in Denmark (Järvinen & Gundelach, 2007), non-drinking is not an easy choice for 15- to 16-year olds in Estonia. There is a culture of situational abstinence—refusing alcohol in one context while consuming it in others—where adolescents negotiate ways of refusing alcohol overall or in particular contexts (Parder, 2016). It emerged that adolescents’ alcohol consumption is not ‘fixed’, but is negotiated in particular situations, including if they do not wish to drink how they refuse.

This study proceeds from the social practice theory approach, which has emerged mainly in environmental sociology and related subfields, such as the sociology of everyday consumption. The concept of social practices was (re-)developed by Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2002) and has its roots in the works of the sociologists Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, and in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The conceptual view is shifted away from the single actor, seeing practices as open-ended, spatially and temporally contextualised and hierarchically organised nexuses of doings and sayings that are the basic units of social processes: ‘sites of the social’ (Schatzki, 2002). A practice is an embodied and materially enabled human activity that includes culturally shared practical understandings (Schatzki et al., 2001), and it is associated with certain things, procedures and understandings (Warde, 2005). Practices are embedded in culture, and individual and collective actors are carriers of both bodily performance and the particular ‘know-how’ of practice (Schatzki, 2001).

According to this theory, adolescents’ alcohol consumption can be conceptualised as a collectively shared social practice. Adolescents learn these culturally shared practical understandings (Schatzki et al., 2001) through different activities and sectors of life. Interaction, which often takes the form of narratives circulated in the collective between actors, holds social practices together (Keller & Halkier, 2013; Vihalemm et al., 2015), and collective practices ‘recruit’ people, with one form of ‘recruitment’ being narratives shared collectively (Parder, 2016; Parder & Vihalemm, 2015). Adolescents may enter, participate and leave alcohol consumption as a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Newcomers are socialised into a community of practice within co-participatory situations, and gradually achieve mastery of practice: skills, meanings and things that are used in the field. The authors’ previous qualitative study of adolescents’ digital forums has shown that some of them feel that they need to learn the social practice of alcohol consumption before reaching adulthood (Parder, 2011). For adolescent alcohol consumption, which is mostly hidden from adults, it is a challenge to study the practice and make it visible. Social practice theory helps to analyse the elements of the practice based on the collective understanding shared by adolescents through narratives. The theory claims that to bring about social change these socio-materially (re-)produced patterns of action have to be addressed (Shove, 2011). Targeting and weakening collective alcohol consumption practices by targeting the narratives related to situational abstinence from alcohol (Parder, 2016) is a promising form of preventive action (Parder & Vihalemm, 2015). Therefore, the current study focused on two main research questions: (1) what ideas of (situational) abstinence adolescents form into narratives, and (2) to what extent action research and co-creation in workshops can be used to study adolescents’ non-drinking stories.

Method and Data Analysis

This study used participatory action research in order to capture and facilitate narratives about non-drinking and situational abstinence among young people aged 13–15, where the participants engaged in storytelling and the co-creation of stories in digital form (videos and pictures). In order to answer the research questions, I organised workshop sessions with adolescents to determine their views on alcohol prevention. Action research has been widely used with young people, from allowing them to express their opinions (Ponciano, 2013) to environmental education (Blanchet-Cohen & Di Mambro, 2015) to reducing drug and sex risks (Berg et al., 2009). It has also been used with approaches stressing the role of community (Duke et al., 1996).

The focus was on two components of action research: doing simultaneous action and research (in workshops) and doing it in a participatory manner (adolescents directed the activities) (Coghlan & Brannick, 2001, p. 7). The project was democratic (Todhunter, 2001) and power was not solely in the hands of the researcher but shared with the adolescents (Gosin et al., 2003), who could guide the direction of the research and choose topics for workshops. Action research projects bring together the expertise of participants and researchers (Gosin et al., 2003), and their dialogic form draws on the epistemology that knowledge is socially constructed rather than objective reality being produced independently of human thought (Phillips, 2011). This means expertise is democratised, where different forms of knowledge are considered to be claims of expertise, and participants, as knowers, are experts (Phillips, 2011). Knowledge is co-produced and actions are designed together with participants based on ‘the assumption that both professional researchers and practitioners can contribute to the research process with different forms of expertise’ (Phillips, 2011, p. 6). My role as a researcher was to ensure that the process was truly participatory, and my attitude was crucial (Gosin et al., 2003). I tried to take a genuine learner’s position even though I was competent to be a teacher in these situations (Swantz, 2013). The aim of the process was that ‘research is carried out with practitioners rather than research on or for’ (Phillips, 2011, p. 44). Since the adolescents chose the topics and pace of actions, this reduced their need to give, and the possibility of giving, socially desired responses to the researcher, or to be artificial in the process, which also contributed to making hidden practice visible to the researcher through the topics discussed and narratives shared.

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Table 1.

Meeting Plan: One Method per Meeting.

Date	Meeting Topic	Meeting Content	Attending
10 March 2016	(I) Introduction. Alcohol party practice	Getting to know each other. Motivations and expectations for participation. Agreements. Anonymity. Agreeing on the next meetings’ topics. Alcohol stories: parties with and without alcohol, opinions of alcohol culture and situational abstinence, social media	Researcher: Mari-Liisa, expert: Eleri. Students: Veiko, Kalev, Siim, Marek, Kairi (ninth grade), Anna-Liisa and Ave (seventh grade)
14 March 2016	(II) Audiovisual production: creating videos	What has happened in the meantime? Noticing alcohol topic. What to know about creating videos with mobiles. Different examples of videos. Finding stories to create a video. Sketching the story on storyboards	Researcher: Mari-Liisa, expert Eleri. Students: Siim, Marek and Kairi (ninth grade)
29 March 2016	(III) Idea visualisation	What has happened in the meantime? Noticing alcohol topic. How to visualise ideas. Sketching alcohol and situational abstinence ideas and stories	Researcher: Mari-Liisa, expert: Tanel. Students: Marek, Kairi (ninth grade) and Anna-Liisa (seventh grade)
5 April 2016	(IV) Photo story	What has happened in the meantime? Noticing alcohol topic. Sketching gossip about high schools and drugs	Researcher: Mari-Liisa, expert: Eleri. Students: Marek and Kairi (ninth grade)
12 April 2016	(V) Video	What has happened in the meantime? Noticing alcohol topic. Creating a video story from comic book-style drawings	Researcher: Mari-Liisa, expert: Eleri. Students: Marek and Kairi (ninth grade)

Source: The author.

Note: Other topics emerged that adolescents found important to discuss, even when they were not related to the workshop.

One school near a big city in Estonia to which the researcher had access was chosen for the research. The project and nature of the contacts with adolescents were introduced to the headmaster and extracurricular activities director of the school to obtain their approval to carry out the project, and Tallinn Medical Research Ethics Committee approval was obtained for the study. The extracurricular activity director of the school was the primary gatekeeper to the adolescents and, since contact with gatekeepers is essential because they have influence over community members (Smith et al., 2010); her ideas were used in order to recruit participants. The researcher introduced the project to all students in seventh to ninth grades in that school (approx. only 70 students overall, so the students all knew each other) and those who were interested and wanted to participate reported back to the extracurricular activities director. Students who wished to participate and whose parents gave their consent were included in the workshops.

Eleven people signed up for the project, seven attended the first meeting, five continued beyond the first meeting and two attended all of the meetings. Similar to Sawyer and Willis (2011), more students originally volunteered to participate in the project, but due to different circumstances, many dropped out during the process. Since it was explained to the adolescents that their participation was voluntary, they did not need to explain why they had decided not to participate or why they had dropped out of the study. ¹

During five one-hour meetings over the course of two months, from March to April 2016, participants decided what audiovisual tools they wanted to learn to use (creating videos, idea visualisation or photo stories; for more details, see Table 1), shared their views and experiences regarding alcohol party culture and situational abstinence and captured shared stories in comic book-style drawings, idea visualisation and digital videos. The researcher and her assistants provided training on using audiovisual tools and introduced the topic of alcohol; the adolescents decided what they wanted to talk about and how they would use the audiovisual tools to capture stories related to alcohol consumption (situational) abstinence and other alcohol- and drug-related discussions. Audiovisual tools were used for digital storytelling in three ways: skills development, reflection and connection making, and fostering voice and empowerment (Anderson & Chua, 2010); the adolescents learned new digital skills for capturing narratives, reflected on their stories, made connections between peers’ experiences and discussed the ways their experiences and ideas could be expressed. This approach was preferred because brainstorming and the discussion of stories facilitated the discussion of previously unacknowledged situations and behaviours (Sawyer & Willis, 2011) that emerged during meetings when participants shared how they had dealt with alcohol in their everyday lives. Meetings were recorded and adolescents produced pictures (with idea visualisation and photo story methods) and a video of shared narratives.

All of the meetings were recorded and transcribed. Materials produced by the participants in visual form were photographed by the researcher and a copy of the final video was transferred to the researcher via data carrier. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis, where the material was coded using four main themes, with three codes for the content of the interaction and one for the method: verbalisation of norms, repertoire shift, role of visuals, and pros and cons of co-creation. The main themes were drawn after familiarisation with the material. Sub-categories for the main themes were created from a close reading of the material. Participants were given pseudonyms after finishing the transcription, and no identifiable elements of participants or the school are provided in this article or elsewhere.

Results

Short and informal participatory action research meetings made it possible to verbalise about alcohol culture, especially norms surrounding alcohol consumption practices, and this made them visible to researchers from outside the culture. Different norms, alcohol party culture and possibilities of non-consumption were discussed during the meetings and, although the participants did not represent the hidden alcohol culture, they were able to shed light on it.

Non-Consumption

When talking about alcohol consumption and situational abstinence, the participants showed that they believed they were not affected by peers and in the best case scenarios power structures, such as the police, could influence adolescents. Participants were strongly pro-autonomy, believing adolescents are self-aware, make decisions, and are not influenced by what other people, such as parents or especially peers, tell them to do. They do agree though that it might depend on the context and on the person. However, during all of the meetings they were rather hesitant about whether they or people they knew would listen to other adolescents:

Interviewer: When you finish this video and share it with other peers, do you think it will have an effect or not?

Marek: I don’t think so.

Kairi: I highly doubt it. Young people are very self-aware these days. They will not listen to anyone.

Interviewer: Not even other young people?

Kairi: Especially other young people. Well, I don’t believe so.

/…/

Interviewer: But what would have an impact? In your opinion?

Marek: Mister policeman.

Kairi. Yes, that definitely would have an impact.

The inevitability of alcohol consumption and the notion that peers have no influence on each other was visualised by Kairi, who imagined how her younger sister would react if Kairi told her she was too young to consume alcohol. Kairi believed her sister would ignore her advice or react aggressively as she visualises on Figure 1. She also noted that, although she considered her sister to be too young for alcohol, she herself was also too young but felt she was more entitled to the activity. This coincides with the notion of how much alcohol and for what reasons it is appropriate to consume at different ages (Parder, 2011).

Tanel: But now it would be interesting to know what you told her or how you expressed yourself that she reacted in that way. What would be the frame before this one?/…/

Kairi: Like, she is too too too young, to even try this. I am also young, but still….

Interviewer: But how young is too too young? When you were thinking about it, who were you thinking about?

Kairi: Directly….

Marek: Your sister.

Kairi: What?

Marek: Your sister.

Kairi: Well, this is, this is way too young like, in my opinion 12 year olds are too young.

/…/

Marek: 15 is not too young?

Kairi: That’s like three years, that’s like pfff.

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Figure 1.

Source: Interviewed Kairi is the one who draw the picture, I as the author of this article also took a photo of her picture.

This notion of the inevitability of alcohol consumption ran through several discussions and stories. The participants believed adolescents made their decisions themselves, and they also believed everyone consumes alcohol, that it is rather normal and an inevitable part of becoming an adult. A serious tone emerged in the discussion between ninth graders and seventh graders on what was not acceptable. All of the participants found drinking at school to be not acceptable, but it was something they had experienced with their classmates. The seventh grader Anna-Liisa shared a story of her classmates not only drinking at school but also showing it off. Although the ninth graders found the alcohol topic to be rather funny, Kairi took another stance after Anna-Liisa shared her story:

Anna-Liisa: In our class they do not hide these things, so when they …

Kalev, Veiko: They do not hide it in ours either.

Anna-Liisa: … came out of there, they breathed in my face, like ‘can you smell it?’

/…/

Marek: They drank at school?

Anna-Liisa: Yes.

Marek: Well, that’s normal.

Kairi: This is a need for attention, like a real need for attention, not because, I don’t know, to keep up the mood at a party or something, but a pure need for attention.

The meetings had an effect on the participants noticing alcohol use in their lives. Kairi shared a story during the fourth meeting about how she had discovered that week that adults consumed too much alcohol. She expressed surprise over this realisation, indicating that this was new to her and that she had not thought about it before.

Interviewer:/…/Have you noticed anything about alcohol in the meantime or not?

Kairi: No. This time not./…/No wait, yes I have.

/…/

Interviewer: What did you notice?

Kairi: Adults drink a lot of vodka. Yeah. That I noticed.

She then explained where she made that observation. In her story, alcohol went together with parties and fun and she emphasised that she had noticed it because the table with her parents and their friends was the noisiest one:

Kairi: On Fridays, or, like, once a month on a Friday, the school’s hall turns into a culture centre, or a culture hall, and there is, like a club meeting, where groups form and then there is, like, since it was the 1st of April, it was like a joke, a joke event there; you had to sing, but mostly it was dancing. There was a party host and dance host and dancing and, like, jokes were told or, like, funny things and then you had to sing but, like, the table I was sitting at, it was, like, it was the noisiest table and the people there also drank the most.

/…/

Interviewer: How were the tables set up?

Kairi: Ah, the groups had formed by themselves; like, the group I was in there were my parents and their friends, which is, like, from kindergarten or, like, my younger sister went to kindergarten with some of them and their parents and our parents have somehow formed a group and they go together.

/…/

Interviewer: And you noticed them (drinking)?

Kairi: Yes. Because they were the noisiest and drank the most.

She also indicated how she came to the conclusion that the drinking happening there was too much: her dance partner was unable to hold himself up and it made dancing difficult. She also finished the story rather abruptly, indicating she did not want to give any details or talk about it any further:

Kairi: Yes, yes, and in the end what they talked about, it was, like, so, you could just laugh at it./…/

Kairi: Oh, and I realised that if you drink too much, then, then, or when your dance partner drinks too much, then you have to carry, to hold him up, because he cannot hold himself up any more.

Marek: You danced with a drunk over there.

/…/

Marek: And then you had to carry him.

Kairi: No, I did not have to carry him, but he lost his coordination and his body position was not proper any more and his hand was sagging all the time and then I had to support it all the time. My shoulder started to hurt. (Turning to Marek) So, your turn, I am talking too much. I want to hear about your weekend now.

This story provided insight into what kind of adult parties adolescents might participate in and how adolescents negotiate the adult party culture and adolescent party culture norms. The participatory approach and continuous meetings gave participants the opportunity to start noticing alcohol-related usage and norms in their lives, as Kairi noticed and said that the party she had attended had too much alcohol. She did not say this about the adolescent parties under discussion during the meetings.

Using the Participatory Approach with Adolescents

Participatory action research opened up the alcohol topic from different perspectives. The process depended largely on the participants and their aims, their willingness to contribute and everyday life experiences. During this project, the extracurricular activities director Helen, who was the gatekeeper of the school, described her students as more open, faster, smarter, more self-aware, and more knowledgeable about their rights than her previous students. She explained that they liked to do several things at once and it was hard for them to concentrate on only one thing (from a meeting with the extracurricular activities director Helen on 2 May). This made the process challenging in terms of adolescents’ motivation: how to motivate adolescents to show up at the meetings and keep them engaged during the meetings, since their motivation fluctuated both between and during the meetings:

Interviewer: So let’s start. What would you like to do today?

Kairi: Let’s go home. Let’s leave.

(fourth meeting)

Some of the volunteers dropped out of the study and according to Helen it was not because they did not want to participate (except for one who clearly stated she did not want to continue), but rather not remembering that there was a meeting and not being required to attend. Helen explained that she had to remind students that it was meeting day again, which according to her came as a surprise to participants every time. One explanation is their highly structured school life filled with stressful obligations, such as exams (during the project, the ninth graders were taking exams to get into their preferred high schools).

Participatory action research requires participation to reach outcomes negotiated during the process. In this case, it seemed the adolescents preferred to participate as little as possible in negotiating possible outcomes. Marek particularly stood out as preferring to talk and guide, whereas Kairi was the one who wanted to do things. Participants were not willing to do anything additional between the meetings:

Interviewer: Or you can record it in the meantime so during the next meeting we can edit?

Marek: No.

Siim: I don’t know if we can find time for that.

Kairi: At the moment, it seems we cannot find the time.

Interviewer: So we have to film it here, during the meeting.

Marek: Yes, basically that is the case.

   (second meeting)

They preferred that everything related to the process was done at the meetings even when this meant that their activities would not be finished. During the meetings, it became clear that their everyday activities took a lot of time: they discussed their homework, exams and other topics important to them.

This raises the question as to whether the participatory approach is always successful. This study showed that, even when adolescents participate and share stories of alcohol party culture and situational abstinence, this does not guarantee an outcome or solution to the question of how these stories can be used in prevention, in adolescents’ opinions. Participants found the topic and activities to be interesting, but they believed that they could not influence peers’ alcohol consumption behaviour in any way. The participants also indicated that consuming alcohol was a personal decision that everyone had to make for themselves.

The participants decided to concentrate not on alcohol but on smoking because of the limitations the school setting created for treating drug-related questions. They found it impossible to visualise alcohol without actually showing it in the video, so they changed the topic from alcohol to tobacco, which they found possible to visualise on school territory. They also preferred dealing with smoking because it was possible for them to show the immediate harm tobacco causes:

Siim: You see it’s a very good idea.

Marek: If you want to run, how your lung capacity shrinks.

Siim: Yes. We will make it about tobacco.

Marek: Such a good idea.

Siim: Yes.

(second meeting)

Participants tried out different ways of visualising stories (see Table 1). During the meetings, they preferred drawing on paper and co-creating stories in comic book style (see Figure 2). Visuals helped them to verbalise different understandings related to alcohol consumption, alcohol parties and the culture of refusal.

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Figure 2.

Source: Drawings are made by the participants and the author clicked the photo of their drawings.

Discussion and Conclusion

Alcohol prevention programmes for adolescents have mostly been based on adult positions (e.g. Barry et al., 2016; Berg et al., 2009; Midford et al., 2015; Williams et al., 2016), although different authors have considered it important to involve adolescents in questions related to them (e.g. Cheon, 2008; Coser et al., 2014; Gosin et al., 2003; Greene & Hecht, 2013; Helm et al., 2015). This study was from the perspective of adolescents and the aim was to test how co-creation and action research approaches can be used to enforce and capture narratives related to adolescents’ alcohol consumption.

The results show that even with a small number of meetings over a short period of time, co-creation and participatory action research provided very good insight into adolescent alcohol culture norms and alcohol consumption practices, creating rich data which are in accordance with my previous studies (Parder, 2011, 2016; Parder & Vihalemm 2015). Instead of a long anthropological or ethnographic study, quick action research over a short period of time provided access to aspects a researcher usually does not have, for example, in in-time interviews, e.g. the time span of different events that I as a researcher could observe. This made it possible to grasp elements of culturally shared practical understandings (Schatzki et al., 2001) communicated through interaction and narratives that hold social practices together (Keller & Halkier, 2013; Vihalemm et al., 2015).

Previous studies (Parder, 2011, 2016; Parder & Vihalemm, 2015) show practices of party planning are important and this study highlighted how adolescents reproduce planning practices in their discussions. This provided opportunities to observe what they had planned and what actually happened afterwards. Two different types of parties—the graduation party and a birthday party—were discussed at length. The continuity of actions revealed the practice of recruiting adolescents and how a planned alcohol-free party turned into an alcohol party. This fit well with the participants’ contradictory beliefs that alcohol consumption was inevitable for them, that every person was autonomous in making decisions, and that they had no power over peers’ decisions or alcohol consumption. Action research and co-creation can thus be productively used to study adolescents’ non-drinking stories and alcohol culture norms.

The results also show co-creation and action research provides a good opportunity for adolescents to reflect on alcohol practices through their own experiences. Participants found sharing stories to be interesting, although they believed stories did not have any influence on their peers. Earlier research showed adolescents to be hesitant about alcohol consumption and thus they searched for information and guidelines from their peers on online forums (Parder & Vihalemm, 2015). One explanation for this contradiction is the difference in target groups of these studies, although both used qualitative approaches focusing on a limited number of adolescents. It is possible that participants in this study were not typical of those seeking advice on forums on sticking to their decisions. Another explanation is the factor of anonymity: adolescents follow an autonomy discourse with their peers, but alone on the internet they search for guidelines and advice from others.

Their reflection on events revealed the graduation party was not discussed nearly as much as the birthday party, indicating the graduation party had a strict script that was already shared knowledge for the participants. For alcohol prevention, this is one point to be targeted to provide alternative narratives to these strict scripts. What emerged in this study was that alternative narratives shape adolescents’ viewpoints, with one example being narratives about non-acceptable forms of alcohol consumption. Participants condemned the alcohol consumption at school that had occurred shortly before the study. Previous studies have revealed that unacceptable actions also include vomiting and embarrassing oneself in other ways (Parder, 2011). Similar stories of taboos have been discussed by Tutenges and Rod (2009).

The current quick action research study also highlighted the fact that adolescents have different perspectives from adults on how problematic alcohol consumption is and how to approach adolescents on this topic. It was not considered to be problematic, although, similar to Greene and Hecht (2013), the participants thought that videos showing immediate consequences were the best way to reach adolescents. Participants also preferred sharing narratives, since they found them interesting, and creating them in different ways, from verbal stories to comic book-style pictures. Additional attention in prevention should be placed on narratives related to parents. The current study highlighted the fact that parents allowing alcohol consumption was shared by adolescents in narrative forms; moreover, parents losing control over their emotions created interesting and funny stories that the adolescents liked to share with peers. Parents should be aware of how entertaining these stories are for adolescents.

Therefore, this small-scale pilot study highlighted several ideas of (situational) abstinence for future experiments, including pro-autonomy-related (the participants’ opinion they make their decisions themselves without influences from other people), peer-related (older siblings forbidding younger ones to consume alcohol), context-related (birthday party and graduation party situations) and parent-related ideas (noticing adult alcohol consumption or non-consumption).

Although the project was democratic (Todhunter, 2001) and the adolescents were experts on their own lives (Phillips, 2011), the project revealed several challenges connected with the method that should be taken into account, including the motivation of the participants, the context in which activities are held and how power is shared between parties. The motivation of the participants plays an important role in collectively shaping the aim of the activity, which in this case moved from collecting and applying non-drinking narratives to drafting narratives on the immediate effects of alcohol consumption. The crucial part is working together to find the angle that motivates adolescents to participate in and lead activities. This study also suggests that much more empowerment might be needed for Estonian adolescents to express and discuss their opinions and experiences.

Where the activities take place also plays a crucial role. In this case, the school context was chosen because it provided very good access to adolescents and promised consistency in attending meetings, because the adolescents did not need to make extra efforts to show up. On the other hand, the school context created many challenges, e.g. the highly structured and institutionalised setting (see also Schensul et al., 2004), and there were many other activities, such as exams and homework. This created problems because the students were busy, so it was difficult to maintain their motivation to continue participating in the study. Motivated adolescents may end up taking part in studies whereas adolescents who are not motivated or who do not have enough free time are left out.

Context is also important in terms of how power is shared: in the school context, which is highly normalised, institutionalised and structured, it is presumed adults have the power. This creates an extra challenge for the co-creation and participatory action research approach, which assumes power is shared evenly between parties. During this study, it emerged that Estonian schools are not used to power being shared. The highly structured school context leaves adolescents little unstructured time for this kind of research. It is a challenge for both the researcher and adolescents to fit these studies into their tight schedules. This raises two questions: (1) whether the participatory approach is more suitable for adolescents who have fewer obligations and whose schedules are less structured, and (2) how to support the opinions of adolescents and empower them, since the action research approach is most suitable for highly motivated students, leaving out those who actually need empowering. Action research and co-creation should thus be carefully used, taking into account the fact that the process might be hindered by the participants not being accustomed to power being shared, the highly structured setting and the tight schedule of participants. Other venues, such as youth centres or extracurricular organisations that have less structured and institutionalised settings can also be used in order to avoid this challenge, but the continuity of the activities might then suffer.

Limitations

The current qualitative study was carried out with a small sample of adolescents to examine how narratives related to alcohol and situational abstinence emerge and become implemented in youth alcohol party culture, and the results thus are not representative of the whole country. Only one type of adolescents participated in the study and the views of adolescents, in general, have not been captured.