Boundaries between Adult and Youth Drinking as Expressed by Young People in Italy and Finland

Abstract

The study applies the concept of boundary work, as developed by Lamont and Molnár to analyze how young people perceive adult drinking. It is based on eight focus groups involving young people aged 17 to 24 years conducted in Torino (IT) and Helsinki (FI). The study contributes to understand why different orientations towards heavy drinking persist in the two geographical regions. In Italy young people draw explicit boundaries between theirs’ and adults’ drinking and between proper and deviant drinking, so that their boundary work results in producing social norms that are shared with adults, except for drunkenness, which is seen as normal for young people but not for adults. In Finland young people distance themselves from adults’ drinking situations, and describe them in terms of light versus heavy drinking, yet without making distinctions between proper and improper drinking in each situation, thereby articulating an absence of explicit norms against drunkenness.