Who: Young people (aged 16-20 years) – Identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, LGBTQIA+, or live in rural/regional areas (meeting any one or more of these criteria)
What: Your role – help the Deakin team – so they can take action to change how social media platforms are used for alcohol promotion
When: Available for 1.5 hours in August-October 2024 and can attend in person or online for 1:1 interview
Where: Online & at Orygen in Parkville.
Paid/price: $40 gift card for participation in interview
How: Complete this application form to register your interest. There is a ‘Plain Language Statement’ in the below link and some questions that relate to the above selection criteria. (link in comments)
should you have any challenges, please contact Alessandro on: a.crocetti@deakin.edu.au
A bit more information below…
- Firstly, help the team understand what you know and experience online – talk about the posts that you see which involve alcohol, specifically posts by other users, influencers, or people you follow, and posts that look like obvious marketing.
- Secondly, your perspectives will be used to help provide insights and self-reflection on the posts you see in your socials, and what changes (if any) you’d like to see from social media platforms or from alcohol marketing, influencers, or other users. This would help the team with a paper that is to be published, the team will then connect again in approximately 5-6 months to share the findings of the work after the research is complete. Should you want to further be engaged in the research and the learnings, the team would be delighted to remain connected with you
Background Information:
Project Description: This project aims to understand how young people are exposed to alcohol promotion on social media platforms via content created by other social media users (i.e. user-generated content, UGC).
Alcohol companies use social media to stimulate UGC to promote their brands, such as hashtag challenges, and users of social media also independently generate content with the use of alcohol-branded hashtags and tags. The nature and extent of alcohol promotion via UGC is not well understood, but we do know that young people are being exposed to a lot of alcohol advertisements on social media platforms: based on recent findings from the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, FARE, young people see more than 40,000 ads per year! How UGC is treated on social media platforms means that it is also difficult to monitor and regulate what young people are exposed to.
The project will use social science approaches with youth (1:1 interview and an online survey) to explore the nature and extent of alcohol promotion on social media and the impact of this exposure on youth attitudes and behaviours. A member of our team will ask you some questions about how your social media use and how seeing alcohol-posts might influence young people. We will also ask about the different types of alcohol-posts that you see on social media, and we will ask about how you interact/engage with posts (like, share or comment). This work will be an extension of an observational study of alcohol promotion via UGC on Instagram and TikTok (undertaken in 2023), of which the findings will inform the interview and survey methods. Our focus will be on three groups of young people: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth, LGBTQIA+ youth and rural/regional youth.
We are inviting young people to be “In it together!” – to help us better understand alcohol promotion in this space and contribute to any advocacy for change by sharing their insights and views.