Youth culture in the UK: independence and round drinking implications for health education

This paper summarizes some recent trends in youth culture research, some applications to the question of drinking in teenage cultures, and some implications for health education. Recent trends in youth culture research have been towards a materialist perspective, acknowledging the importance of social class and sexual divisions. Working class youth are seen as in transition to the labour market, and youth cultures are described as collective strategies on the part of specific groups of youth to manage that transition, responding to the conditions obtaining in their locality and to the class traditions and other resources at their disposal. Findings of recent research into drinking in a youth culture of boy and girls making the transition to the service sector of an inner city economy are described. "Roundbuying" is characteristic of drinking in this "service-sector youth culture". The independence and sex-equality facilitated within the service-sector of the economy is reproduced within the leisure sphere of those entering that economy: the round is a social celebration of production relations. The social form of drinking in other youth cultures and in other localities and countries will vary according to the material conditions and youth-cultures responses in those localities and countries, and are open to empirical investigation. Suggestions are made about the need to adopt a materialist approach in health education, recognizing these circumstances.