Alcohol as an object of social construction: a mixed methods approach to joint analysis of the press and the Italian laws

The use and abuse of alcohol are debated social issues in Italy, particularly as regards the changes in the quantity and in the style of consumption observed in young people. The present contribution examines, from a socio-constructivist perspective, the relationship between political choices and the representations diffused by media. In detail, this research compares the contents of laws regulating alcohol use and sale, with the way in which alcohol-related issues are represented by the press. Drawing on a preliminary analysis of the entire corpus of Italian laws (from 1940 to 2009) three turning points in the regulation of alcoholics in Italy were identified: 1999, 2003, 2009. The current contribution focused on these three years. The norms issued by the Italian parliament in 1999, 2003 and 2009 and a representative sample of articles published on “Alcohol and Young people” by the two most read Italian generalist newspapers (La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera) constituted the textual corpus of this investigation, focused on “Alcohol and young people”. The strategy of analysis followed a mixed-design approach: the two corpora were submitted to different typology of content analyses (statistical analysis of textual data and hermeneutic analysis are applied), in order to point out the main contents, the similarity and the differences between the themes, as well as their relative prominence in the media and in the laws. Preliminary results indicate only a limited overlapping between media and normative representations, particularly as regards alcohol-related driving accidents. Other dimensions that are present in the norms and laws examined, such as the description of alcohol as a social issue, or the need to define rehabilitation programmes, are almost excluded from the representations diffused by the press. Fine grained analyses are undergoing