Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tigerstedt, Christoffer
• Jaana, Markkula
• Karlsson, Thomas
• Jukka, Jokela
• Minna, Pietikäinen

Titel

Finlands svenskspråkiga ungdomars dryckesvanor i Österbotten och huvudstadsregionen: En jämförelse med finskspråkiga ungdomar

Ist Teil von

• Nordisk alkohol- & narkotikatidskrift : NAT, 2008-02, Vol.25 (1), p.5-21

Ort / Verlag

London, England: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• There is some research evidence which suggests that drinking habits among Swedish-speaking Finns differ from those of Finnish-speaking Finns. The limited literature on this subject routinely lumps the minority of Swedish-speaking Finns into one single group. The assumption is that drinking habits in the Swedish-speaking population are less damaging to health than drinking habits in the Finnish-speaking majority. In this study we use data from the nationwide School Health Promotion Study, which in principle covers all pupils in the 8th and 9th grade of comprehensive school and the 1st and 2nd grade of upper secondary school. We chose to focus on two areas with a sufficiently large number of Swedish-speaking residents and, by tradition, different drinking habits, i.e. Ostrobothnia and the metropolitan Helsinki area. All in all, the data consist of 5,698 Swedish-speaking and 29,708 Finnish-speaking adolescents aged ca. 14–18. The results show that when the populations from the two areas are taken together, there are indeed differences between the two language groups. The almost ten-year downward trend in youthful drinking in Finland is clearly attributable to Finnish-speaking youth. This is also true for the reductions seen in frequent drinking and binge drinking. In a comparison of Ostrobothnia and the metropolitan Helsinki area, it turns out that the differences between Swedish-speaking youngsters are considerable: abstention, less frequent drinking and less binge drinking are clearly more prevalent in Ostrobothnia than in the Helsinki area. By comparison, the Finnish-speaking adolescents in the two regions differ less clearly from each other. Conspicuous subgroups within the Swedish-speaking minority are the binge drinking upper secondary students in the Helsinki area, the abstaining girls from comprehensive schools in the almost exclusively Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnian municipalities, and the abstaining youngsters from the “bible zone” in Ostrobothnia. In contrast to earlier findings, we found that in Ostrobothnia the drinking habits of the two language groups are quite similar.