Friday class/workshop

During this afternoon's lecture I took down one note that I found really intriguing:
"theory is fluid and for ever changing/growing".

Then I went to the Play workshop I had signed up for with Tanya - and OMG it was amazing!!!
I've never really known much about play theory but Tanya engaged us in this really interesting exercise/game where there was a team trying to break free of a castle and they had to overcome obstacles like crossing the turbulent waters without getting their feet wet by creating stuff with their magic pen/paper, and there was another team that was to stop them at all costs (my team). It was so fun trying to combat each other as they came up with new ideas, we would come up with new ways to stop them. It was only at the end when Tanya asked us to think about what the workshop might've been trying to show that we all thought about it as a theory rather than a game yet none of us knew it's purpose. And then she revealed that it was depression - and the team that was overcoming the obstacles were those that are depressed and the team that was stopping them were depression. It was a revelationary moment for me and I'm not sure if/how I'll use it to influence my project but it was definitely and eye-opening workshop!

Research

After my advisor session with Lee, I looked into both the Temperance Movement and the Six O'Clock Swill to get a better depth of understanding around my topic.

I also found some great readings around my subject, and started to read and make notes from these.

I know that I need to push myself to step out of the box with this class so have signed up to the PLAY workshop on Friday which I'm really intrigued about, and signed up to talk to Patricia as her them was 'trying the untried' which is exactly what I need to do!

Advisor crit #1 with Lee

Talking to Lee was so great! I had a lot of ideas at the moment bouncing around and he embraced that and told me that all my thoughts were valid at this stage and that I can be quite open at this point. To help me get some more perspective he was able to advise me a couple of things to look into further and gave me a piece of gold when he said that just because campaigns are the way other people have tried to combat the issue doesn't mean that's how I have to approach it and the project could become really interesting if I look at different angles that I may be able to use.

Fleshing out my topic

In preparation for my advisor session with Lee this afternoon, I wanted to try and think about what my design issue within my topic, and think about what kind of things were successfully engaging my target audience.

More existing precedents

When researching existing information relating to drinking culture in New Zealand I also came across some things that weren't campaigns as such so thought they were worth taking note of.

http://www.alcohol.org.nz/resources-research/alcohol-resources/ebooks-and-guidelines/say-now-guidelines-toolbox

SAY NOW is a collaborative education awareness approach to reducing alcohol-related harm through sports clubs. This programme encourages decision makers within sports clubs to foster environments that model responsible drinking behaviours.
Three components of the SAY NOW model:
- Development of responsible attitudes and behaviors towards drinking
- Creation of safer drinking environments
- Demonstration of positive youth development.

http://www.alcohol.org.nz/sites/default/files/field/file_attachment/HPA%27s%20AlcoholNZ-June-2016.pdf
The June 2016 edition of the Alcohol NZ mag was focused on "young people".

It touched on a few really good points - one being the recognition of some of the reasons young people drink:
• are just out for a good time – and how do we have a good time in Kiwi culture? We get drunk
• are bored and there is nothing else to do but go out with mates and get drunk
• are very shy and find it difficult to make friends – alcohol is a great help for that
• have bad memories of being abused sexually, physically or emotionally and are trying to drown out the pain
• are ill and have anxiety or depression and are trying to treat themselves with alcohol.

Another being this piece from pg21:
The adolescent brain is not just a young version of an adult brain – it is biologically different. It is going through an important period of change which makes it more vulnerable to the toxic effects of alcohol – and all other psychoactive drugs. In New Zealand the most common form of problematic substance use in adolescents is binge drinking of alcohol (Fleming, Lee, Moselen, Clark & Dixon, 2014).
This makes me think I might need to define my age bracket more and look at the physiological effects of alcohol on the body.

From pg 24 were some interesting gender points:
Adverse effects can happen in a gender-specific way, which may reflect the fact that the brains of boys and girls mature at different rates. Differences have been observed in both brain structure and brain function. For example, in terms of brain structure, the prefrontal cortex volumes of adolescent females with alcohol use disorders were shown to be smaller than controls and those of males larger than controls (Caldwell et al., 2005).
In terms of gender differences in brain function, in females more drinking days in the year were correlated with worsening visuospatial functioning. In males, more severe hangover symptoms in the preceding year were correlated with worsening sustained attention (Squeglia, Schweinsburg, Pulido & Tapert, 2011).

Pg 28 detailed some interesting statistics around WHAT students drink:
The 2012 Youth2000 Survey found that the types of alcoholic drinks that secondary school students usually consumed were RTDs (ready-to-drink mixes) (53%), beer (28%), spirits (9%), wine (5%) and other (4%). Females were more likely to consume RTDs (71%) than males (32%), and males (51.9%) were more likely to consume beer than females (9%) (Adolescent Health Research Group, 2013).

The Alcohol NZ magazine then led me to find out about a programme called Red Frogs.
http://nz.redfrogs.com/

Red Frogs originated in Australia in 1997 when Andy Gourley and his mates volunteered to work with young people in a hotel at the infamous Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast. They saw a massive need for support for the many young people who were partying there. They used Allen’s Red Frogs lollies as ice breakers to initiate conversations and became known as the Red Frogs crew. Red Frogs is now a global youth support programme working in several countries, and began in NZ in 2007. Their vision to see a radical change in the drinking and party culture in New Zealand. The focus is mostly on young people aged 15 to 25 years, as this is a stage of life when people are being exposed to environments where alcohol is present and they are starting to go to parties.

Research, research, research!

First things first I mind-mapped my topic and pretty much word dumped everything I was thinking/considering about my project at the start:

Then thinking about the societal issues around drinking culture, I considered how smoking culture has become frowned upon more these days and considered the relationships between the two.

Remembering the session we had with the librarian (most helpful part of the paper so far!), my starting point for research was to google with a few key words of my topic. I started with the things like "drinking culture + New Zealand" and found a few articles to read, saved them, and then moved onto library searches. I requested some books, and found the Visual Research book Lee had talked about during one of our previous lectures and flicked through that. There were some great pages which I photocopied for reference later.

The next step for me was to look at existing campaigns. And I wasn't surprised to find that there were a number of them, but I was surprised as a female to see a lack of representation of females - and when it was there it was very negative. This was an interesting note for me.

These are the notes I made about each campaign and some of the videos/websites that related to them.

https://www.hellosundaymorning.org/

(this campaign was by far a stand out because of it's not print/video base)

Getting started!

Coming in to this paper all I knew was that I wanted to look at drinking culture in New Zealand for my major project. That's it.

It was great to get set up with supervision groups and be introduced to the team of advisors/lecturers for our 4th year in Week 1 - but that was all it was good for. Many people hadn't picked a topic, and we were then just kind of left to our own devices.

Week 2 consisted of being told that it was ok if we didn't have a topic yet (stressful! But I do have a topic so what about me???), and doing 2 workshops that I didn't really find very helpful. I took the Semiotics workshop with Lee and Karl which really just consisted of bouncing ideas around with a group of peers, and then went to the Communication workshop with Tristam and Patricia which was a strange exercise that I didn't really understand.

Week 3 was a tough week as I wasn't well and missed the "bring a thing" discussion, but my friends caught me up and did the exercise with me which meant I didn't miss out on much.

So then Week 4 came around and I decided it was time to take this paper into my own hands, because clearly nobody else was gunna kick my ass into gear and get stuck into it. So it's from this point that the real research began...