Youth Drinking Cultures offers a comprehensive set of perspectives on adolescent drinking in Europe. In the book, a team of leading researchers provides cross-national comparisons to investigate how drinking behaviour varies, examining factors such as gender, societal context and family socio-economic backgrounds.

Contents: Foreword; Youth drinking cultures: European experiences, Margaretha Järvinen and Robin Room; Understanding cultural differences in young people's drinking, Robin Room; Drunken behaviour, expectancies and consequences among European students, Barbro Andersson and Björn Hibell; Gender differences in youth drinking cultures, Salme Ahlström; The impact of socioeconomic status on adolescent drinking behaviour, Matthias Richter, Anja Leppin, Saoirse Nic Gabhainn and Klaus Hurrelmann; The impact of parents on adolescent drinking and friendship selection processes, Rutger C.M.E. Engels, Rebecca N.H. De Leeuw, Evelien A.P. Poelen, Haske van der Vorst, Carmen S. van der Zwaluw and Jan F. van Leeuwe; Consumption beyond control. The centrality of heavy social drinking in the lifestyles of English youth, Howard Parker; Being 'taught to drink'. UK teenagers' experience, Martin Plant and Patrick Miller; Alcohol use among Danish adolescents: a self- and social identity perspective, Kirsten Verkooijen, Gert A. Nielsen, Nanne de Vries and Kim Bloomfield; Conclusion: changing drunken component or reducing alcohol-related harm, Margaretha Järvinen and Robin Room; Index.

'This book provides a fascinating and comprehensive account of the epidemiology, psychology and sociology of drinking amongst young Europeans. It conceptualises and explains the complex variations in and dynamics of adolescent drinking patterns and related problems, and is full of intelligent observations that will appeal to researchers, policy makers and practitioners'. David Moore, National Drug Research Institute, Australia 'This book provides a very valuable contribution by offering a variety of approaches and analyses to assess young people’s drinking behaviour. It not only demonstrates how youth drinking differs across countries, gender and social classes, but also enables us to better understand cultures of drinking and intoxication among young people in Europe.' Ingeborg Rossow, Norwegian Institute for Alcohol and Drug Research, Norway 'I recommend this book as an important source of information detailing current efforts to understand youth drinking cultures...Many of the chapters report original analyses of pertinent qualitative and quantitative surveys.' Drug and Alcohol Review '...the book offers a new map of European youth drinking, based on cultures of intoxication and cultures of non-intoxication...A key finding from the book concerns the mainstreaming of intoxication within the leisure patterns of many young people...This book reveals that tension in the contrast between broad-brush national comparisons based on ESPAD and HBSC on the one hand, and discussions of youth drinking cultures framed around the 'lifestylization' of drinking and drunkenness on the other... The findings communicated here set us off in the right direction' Leisure Studies 'The book provides a tightly focused discussion of a major issue of health and social policy concern in contemporary Europe...a timely, balanced and very useful contribution to the academic, public and policy debates on "binge drinking", and I have no doubt that it will be used widely for both teaching