Understanding stability and change in British drinking using 16 years of market research data

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From 2001 to 2016, Great Britain experienced a historic peak in alcohol consumption followed by a sharp decline. These trends coincided with a series of cross-departmental alcohol strategies, licensing reforms, a smoking ban in pubs, debates about alcohol duty and minimum prices, media focus on 'Binge Britain' and 'Ladette' culture, and a new generation of young adults noted for their abstemious approach to alcohol. It has been argued that fundamental changes in our country's drinking culture have resulted but these are, as yet, poorly documented and understood. For example, whilst we have good data on how the amount consumed has changed, we know far less about changes in where, when, why, with whom or how people drink.This is important as achieving a better understanding of the social and environmental context of health-related behavioural change is increasingly central to efforts to improve public health and well-being. The Lancet, the Medical Research Council, social epidemiologists and complex systems theorists have all highlighted the lack of attention given to the micro-level social, cultural and geographic contexts in which health-related behaviours and interventions to address them take place. This has limited our ability to provide expert commentary on how health behaviours relate to wider cultural and structural shifts, to anticipate and respond to future trends, and to inform public policy and debate.Alcohol research is a case in point. Despite the subject's long history in the health and social sciences, researchers often struggle to describe, and offer convincing explanations of, changes in drinking culture. A key reason for this is that most of the quantitative evidence treats alcohol use as if it was a single behaviour defined by how much people drink. In reality, there are many different types of occasion in which drinking occurs, characterised by the context in which they take place (e.g. pub lunch, relaxing at home, a night out), and types of occasions are often the focus of attention in lay discourse and policy debate. Quantitative evidence tailored to such perspectives can deliver understanding of how British drinking culture is changing, where to intervene to promote positive trends and curtail negative ones, and which preventative policies effectively tackle the types of drinking causing most concern.This project responds by shifting attention from drinkers to the drinking occasion. It anticipates delivering a step-change in our understanding of alcohol use by analysing a large internationally-unique dataset of 785,000 occasions reported by 255,000 individuals between 2001 and 2016. The work is divided into three work packages (WP): WP1 will explore how British drinking changed from 2001 to 2016. It will identify the predominant types of drinking occasions seen, based on characteristics such as the occasion's purpose, location, timing, participants, amount and type of alcohol drunk, and other activities undertaken while drinking (e.g. eating). We will examine if new types of drinking have emerged, which occasions became more or less common, how the characteristics of occasions changed and how these changes relate to the overall consumption trend.WP2 and WP3 will test a series of hypotheses which seek to explain trends in drinking occasions, use drinking occasions to explain population trends in consumption, and examine the impact of three major societal changes on drinking occasions, namely the 2008 recession, the 2003 Licensing Act and bans on smoking in pubs. In developing explanations for observed trends and variations, we will focus on under-researched and policy-relevant topics such as increased home drinking and drinking among women, drinking in middle- and older-age, variation in drinking cultures across geographic areas, the decline in young adults' drinking, the alcohol harm paradox and relationships between drinking and social roles such as parenthood and employment.