Browsing by Author "McCreanor, Tim"
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- ItemConsuming identities: alcohol marketing and the commodification of youth experience(Informa Healthcare, 2005-12) McCreanor, Tim; Moewaka Barnes, Helen; Gregory, Mandi; Kaiwai, Hector; Borell, SuareeMarketing has successfully used the postmodern turn in conceptualisations of the human subject and incorporated contemporary theorising of identities and self into its understanding of the key drivers of consumption. Such developments clearly converge in alcohol marketing practices that target young people where commercialized youth identities available for consumption and engagement are a significant element. This paper reports data from young people that reflect the uptake of such identities and considers the challenges that these developments represent for public health and the wellbeing of young people.
- ItemCreating intoxigenic environments: Marketing alcohol to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand(Elsevier, 2008-09) McCreanor, Tim; Moewaka Barnes, Helen; Kaiwai, Hector; Borell, Suaree; Gregory, AmandaAlcohol consumption among young people in New Zealand is on the rise. Given the broad array of acute and chronic harms that arise from this trend, it is a major cause for alarm and it is imperative that we improve our knowledge of key drivers of youth drinking. Changes wrought by the neoliberal political climate of deregulation that characterised the last two decades in many countries including Aotearoa New Zealand have transformed the availability of alcohol to young people. Commercial development of youth alcohol markets has seen the emergence of new environments, cultures and practices around drinking and intoxication but the ways in which these changes are interpreted and taken up is not well understood. This paper reports findings from a qualitative research project investigating the meaning-making practices of young people in New Zealand in response to alcohol marketing. Research data included group interviews with a range of Maori and Pakeha young people at three time periods. Thematic analyses of the youth data on usages of marketing materials indicate naturalisation of tropes of alcohol intoxication. We show how marketing is used and enjoyed in youth discourses creating and maintaining what we refer to as intoxigenic social environments. The implications are considered in light of the growing exposure of young people to alcohol marketing in a discussion of strategies to manage and mitigate its impacts on behaviour and consumption.
- ItemFlaunting it on Facebook: Young adults, drinking cultures and the cult of celebrity(Massey University School of Psychology, 2014-03) Lyons, Antonia; McCreanor, Tim; Hutton, Fiona; Goodwin, Ian; Barnes, Helen Moewaka; Griffin, Christine; Kerryellen, Vroman; O’Carroll, Acushla Dee; Niland, Patricia; Samu, LinaYoung adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within a collective culture of intoxication to ‘have fun’ and ‘be sociable’. This population has also rapidly increased their use of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/ video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to be obsessed with identity, image and celebrity. This research project explored the ways in which new technologies are being used by a range of young people (and others, including marketers) in drinking practices and drinking cultures in Aotearoa/NZ. It also explored how these technologies impact on young adults’ behaviours and identities, and how this varies across young adults of diverse ethnicities (Maori [indigenous people of NZ], Pasifika [people descended from the Pacific Islands] and Pakeha [people of European descent]), social classes and genders. We collected data from a large and diverse sample of young adults aged 18-25 years employing novel and innovative methodologies across three data collection stages. In total 141 participants took part in 34 friendship focus group discussions (12 Pakeha, 12 Maori and 10 Pasifika groups) while 23 young adults showed and discussed their Facebook pages during an individual interview that involved screencapture software and video recordings. Popular online material regarding drinking alcohol was also collected (via groups, interviews, and web searches), providing a database of 487 links to relevant material (including websites, apps, and games). Critical and in-depth qualitative analyses across these multimodal datasets were undertaken. Key findings demonstrated that social technologies play a crucial role in young adults’ drinking cultures and processes of identity construction. Consuming alcohol to a point of intoxication was a commonplace leisure-time activity for most of the young adult participants, and social network technologies were fully integrated into their drinking cultures. Facebook was employed by all participants and was used before, during and following drinking episodes. Uploading and sharing photos on Facebook was particularly central to young people’s drinking cultures and the ongoing creation of their identities. This involved a great deal of Facebook ‘work’ to ensure appropriate identity displays such as tagging (the addition of explanatory or identifying labels) and untagging photos. Being visible online was crucial for many young adults, and they put significant amounts of time and energy into updating and maintaining Facebook pages, particularly with material regarding drinking practices and events. However this was not consistent across the sample, and our findings revealed nuanced and complex ways in which people from different ethnicities, genders and social classes engaged with drinking cultures and new technologies in different ways, reflecting their positioning within the social structure. Pakeha shared their drinking practices online with relatively little reflection, while Pasifika and Maori participants were more likely to discuss avoiding online displays of drinking and demonstrated greater reflexive self-surveillance. Females spoke of being more aware of normative expectations around gender than males, and described particular forms of online identity displays (e.g. moderated intake, controlled selfdetermination). Participants from upper socio-economic groups expressed less concern than others about both drinking and posting material online. Celebrity culture was actively engaged with, in part at least, as a means of expressing what it is to be a young adult in contemporary society, and reinforcing the need for young people to engage in their own everyday practices of ‘celebritising’ themselves through drinking cultures online. Alcohol companies employed social media to market their products to young people in sophisticated ways that meant the campaigns and actions were rarely perceived as marketing. Online alcohol marketing initiatives were actively appropriated by young people and reproduced within their Facebook pages to present tastes and preferences, facilitate social interaction, construct identities, and more generally develop cultural capital. These commercial activities within the commercial platforms that constitute social networking systems contribute heavily to a general ‘culture of intoxication’ while simultaneously allowing young people to ‘create’ and ‘produce’ themselves online via the sharing of consumption ‘choices’, online interactions and activities.
- ItemMaori family culture: a context of youth development in Counties/Manukau(Royal Society of New Zealand, 2007) Edwards, Shane; McCreanor, Tim; Moewaka Barnes, HelenThis paper reports on a study designed to bring the voices of young people directly into the social science literature on environmental influences on wellbeing. We analyse accounts from young Maori about their families and the roles they play in their lives in order to focus on strengths and positive resources for the promotion of youth wellbeing. Interview data were gathered from 12 females and 15 males, aged between 12 and 25 years, resident in the Counties/Manukau region. Participants who were managing satisfactorily in their lives were purposively selected for diversity of background and circumstances. Our “lifestory” approach sought narrative accounts of both everyday experience and the highs and lows of life; data were transcribed verbatim and analysed using discursive methods. Clusters of themes relating to family environments including relationships with parents, siblings and extended kin groups emerged. Participants provided detailed and nuanced accounts of family cultures, reporting on conflict, caring, gender issues, sensitivity, discipline, levels of guidance and forms of support.
- ItemMedia, racism and public health psychology(Sage, 2006-03) Nairn, Raymond; Pega, Frank; McCreanor, Tim; Rankine, Jenny; Barnes, AngelaA growing literature has established that racism contributes to ill-health of migrants, minority group members and indigenous peoples. Racial discrimination has been shown to act at personal, institutional and societal levels, negatively affecting physical health as evidenced by heart disease and other stress related conditions and generally negating wellbeing, signalled by psychological and psychiatric disorders including depression. In our highly mediatized world, mass communications in diverse forms are decisive for people’s knowledge and understandings of the world and their place in it. From critical studies we know that the media consistently marginalize, denigrate and neglect particular ethnic and cultural groups. Where media do focus on such groups much of the reporting is negative and stereotyping. Achievements are ignored or minimized while representations of those groups as problems for and threats to the dominant are highlighted. In this paper we consider the particular case of media representations of the indigenous Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand. We review extant studies to argue that detailed and systematic study is necessary for the development of critical, local media scholarship. Such scholarship is necessary if the current media impact on Maori health and wellbeing is to be mitigated. While such considerations may not have been traditional concerns of health psychology we, following George Albee (2003), argue for them as affirming the need for critical public health psychology.
- ItemResiliency, Connectivity and Environments: Their roles in theorizing approaches to the promoting the wellbeing of young people(Clifford Beers Foundation, 2004-02) McCreanor, Tim; Watson, PeterEarly theory and findings in the area of resilience among young people emphasised individual differences and personality characteristics to explain different reactions to stress and risk. The ‘modern’ resiliency literature views the possible explanatory variables for different outcomes in broader contexts such as family, schools and community. Despite this change over time the individualising, problem focused orientation of resilience approaches continues to obscure the environment, leaving it an under-interrogated factor in youth wellbeing. The importance of this rests on its impact on policy and practice in the fields of youth development and health promotion. In this paper we argue that contemporary resiliency theory and research continue to fall short of the paradigm shift called for by those orienting to environmentally-based public health measures to improve population level wellbeing among young people.
- ItemResiliency, Connectivity and Environments: Their roles in theorizing approaches to the promoting the wellbeing of young people(Clifford Beers Foundation, 2004-02) McCreanor, Tim; Watson, PeterEarly theory and findings in the area of resilience among young people emphasised individual differences and personality characteristics to explain different reactions to stress and risk. The ‘modern’ resiliency literature views the possible explanatory variables for different outcomes in broader contexts such as family, schools and community. Despite this change over time the individualising, problem focused orientation of resilience approaches continues to obscure the environment, leaving it an under-interrogated factor in youth wellbeing. The importance of this rests on its impact on policy and practice in the fields of youth development and health promotion. In this paper we argue that contemporary resiliency theory and research continue to fall short of the paradigm shift called for by those orienting to environmentally-based public health measures to improve population level wellbeing among young people.
- ItemStripping the Skin off Humour(Massey University, 2011) Rangiwananga, Melissa; Coombes, Leigh; McCreanor, TimCulturally specific hegemonic processes produce authority over meaning and exclude possibilities for authentic ethical encounters. Contingent on a binary relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’, humour holds social tensions in particular ways. Where contemporary understandings of humour tend to posit humour as self-evidently desirable (Billig, 2005), there is an absence of psychological attention to the social power relations that constitute the “performativity” of humour – or as Butler (1993, p. 2) suggests, “the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”. This paper draws on the experience of living the contradictions of hegemonic discourse that produces social positions where laughter is enacted to enable a ‘safe’ encounter. If humour occurs on the boundaries of social convention then what does that mean for the complex relationships at “the hyphen” (Fine & Sirin, 2007; Jones & Jenkins, 2008) between us/them? Is it possible that rather than simply maintaining a particular social order, humour may also enable a re-defining of the contours of social relations? Could humour open spaces at the boundaries through recognition of multiple competing political discourses and make it possible for an ethical response that seeks authentic encounters with the ‘other’?
- ItemTauiwi general practitioners explanations of Maori health: Colonial relations in primary healthcare in Aotearoa/New Zealand?(Sage, 2002-09) McCreanor, Tim; Nairn, RaymondThis paper reports initial findings from qualitative research investigating how general practitioners talk about Maori health. Transcripts of semi-structured interviews with 25 general practitioners from urban Auckland were subjected to critical discursive analyses. Through this process of intensive, analytic reading, interpretative repertoires – patterns of words and images about a particular topic – were identified. This paper presents the main features of one such repertoire, termed Maori Morbidity, that the general practitioners used in accounting for poor Maori health status. Our participants were drawing upon a circumscribed pool of ideas and explaining the inequalities in health between Maori and Tauiwi in ways that gave primacy to characteristics of Maori and their culture. We discuss the implications of this conclusion for relations between Maori patients and Tauiwi doctors in primary healthcare settings.
- ItemTowards promoting youth mental health in Aotearoa/New Zealand: Holistic "houses" of health(Clifford Beers Foundation, 2002-05) Anae, Melanie; Moewaka Barnes, Helen; McCreanor, Tim; Watson, PeterA study of the literature on mental health promotion suggests that to a far greater extent than ‘physical’ health concerns, mental health seems to be dominated by the illness focus of established clinical perspectives and practices. In Aotearoa/New Zealand this leaves little in the way of conceptual space or fiscal resources for the development of new preventative possibilities of population-oriented measures focussed on enhancing social and physical environments. Outflanking this unfortunate impasse, indigenous Maori and Samoan (Pacific) conceptual frameworks for health offer holistic theoretical foundations upon which we can work for health through positive development. This paper examines these frameworks and the youth development paradigm to draw out parameters of what might count as healthy youth development in this country.
- ItemTowards promoting youth mental health in Aotearoa/New Zealand: Holistic "houses" of health(Clifford Beers Foundation, 2002-05) Anae, Melanie; Moewaka Barnes, Helen; McCreanor, Tim; Watson, PeterA study of the literature on mental health promotion suggests that to a far greater extent than ‘physical’ health concerns, mental health seems to be dominated by the illness focus of established clinical perspectives and practices. In Aotearoa/New Zealand this leaves little in the way of conceptual space or fiscal resources for the development of new preventative possibilities of population-oriented measures focussed on enhancing social and physical environments. Outflanking this unfortunate impasse, indigenous Maori and Samoan (Pacific) conceptual frameworks for health offer holistic theoretical foundations upon which we can work for health through positive development. This paper examines these frameworks and the youth development paradigm to draw out parameters of what might count as healthy youth development in this country.