Sample selection

In total, over 3,500 adults aged 18 and over recorded drinking alcohol at least once during the diary week in the HSE 2011, which was equivalent to 73% of the total who completed the seven-day drinking diary. From this, a sample was selected by NatCen to be contacted about taking part in a subsequent research study. NatCen charged a fee to cover the data manager’s time, postal costs of sending letters, and hosting a Freephone number. For the convenience of the participants, the interviews were to take place face-to-face in participants’ own homes. In order to keep travel costs to a minimum, this meant that they needed to live within a reasonable distance of London to be interviewed. NatCen requested that London boroughs were selected for sampling to take place from. Ten London boroughs were chosen:

 Camden

 Hammersmith and Fulham

 Kensington & Chelsea

 Kingston

 Lambeth

 Merton

 Richmond

 Southwark

 Wandsworth

 Westminster

As the interviews were to focus on issues surrounding under-reporting of alcohol consumption, it was decided that only participants who drank alcohol in the diary week should be selected.

Further, to reduce the probability of interviewing only occasional drinkers - for whom issues of under-reporting are likely to be less pertinent in terms of the absolute amount of drinking not captured – the sample was restricted to those who drank on four or more days in the diary week only. Selection on quantity rather than frequency of alcohol consumption was considered but this was not done because frequency gave a clearer idea of a regular drinking pattern than quantity. There was no selection on demographic or social variables meaning the demographic and social characteristics of those selected were random. Finally, only one individual was selected in each household to avoid the risk of two interviews being conducted with members of

154 the same household, as this would narrow the demographic and social variation if at least 20%

(i.e. two out of 10 interviewees) of the participants interviewed lived together.

7.6 Methods

7.6.1 Recruitment

Once ethical approval had been awarded and sent to NatCen, the data managers selected the sample based on the criteria in Section 7.5. In total, NatCen identified 26 eligible survey participants from the HSE 2011 dataset. Each of these participants was sent a letter by NatCen (which was written jointly by NatCen and UCL) informing them about the study ‘Ordinary drinking patterns and your experience of drinking diaries’. The letter was sent on 11^th September 2012 on NatCen headed paper. HSE 2011 participants who did not wish to be contacted by the researcher could telephone a Freephone number within two weeks of receipt of the letter to withdraw (n=1). After this time, the details of the remaining 25 participants were passed on securely in a password-protected compressed Excel spreadsheet. The details passed on were full name, address and telephone number, and crucially, did not include identifiers which would make the participant identifiable in the HSE 2011 dataset. Therefore it was not possible to explore survey responses of the participants interviewed; this was intentional such that their anonymity in the dataset was protected. Participants were contacted and interviews arranged by telephone in late September 2012. Six selected participants were unreachable (daytime and evening calls were attempted), four survey participants declined to take part in the study, and four were not contacted and kept as reserves (the least accessible in terms of public transport), in case of withdrawal after interviews were arranged.

7.6.2 Procedure

In total, 10 interviews were completed. These primarily took place in participants’ own homes (n=9), with the remaining interview taking place in a workplace (which was a café after lunch service had finished). After a brief and informal introduction to put the participants at ease, participants were asked to read the information sheet and then sign the consent form before the interviews commenced. The interviews were recorded on an Olympus Dictaphone with an internal microphone (as used in the pilot study). The majority of visits took around 45 minutes to an hour, although a small number of visits were shorter at approximately 30 minutes, and one was closer to two hours. The first part of the interview concentrated on participants’ experience of the drinking diary, then a more in-depth discussion of routine drinking practices, drinking patterns and styles, and under-reporting followed. The interview schedule is available in Appendix P. Participants were given a £10 gift voucher at the end of the interview as a thank-you for their participation. Interviews took place in daytimes, evenings and weekends in October and November 2012.

155 Efforts were made to make participants feel at ease and to build up a similar rapport with each such that participants’ willingness to share information was maximised. Although this was compromised to some extent by the researcher sharing more characteristics with some participants than others, all the interviews were conducted by the same researcher. There was a range of responses in the interviews, and the level of detail that participants provided varied.

Some participants were more talkative and willing to share their experiences and views than others. A small number of participants whose responses were less detailed may not have been confident with their level of English, as it was apparent that it was not their first language. This may have acted as a barrier to gaining the depth of responses that was achieved in some of the other interviews.

7.6.3 Analysis

Interviews were transcribed manually on a MacBook using a USB foot pedal and trial versions of transcription software. All interviews were transcribed within one or two days of the interview taking place, such that the experience of conducting the interview was still recent. Any identifiable information or personal information (e.g. if a participant mentioned their spouse by name) was removed from interview transcripts at this stage. Comments and coloured fonts were used to flag parts of the transcript that appeared important at this initial stage. All interviews were completed and transcribed before the analysis took place in Microsoft Excel. This was suitable for analysing the 10 interviews, especially because only one person was working on the data. It is important to note here that all interviews were conducted, transcribed and analysed before the quantitative analyses presented in the previous chapter (Chapter 6) commenced.

Therefore the interpretation of the interviews was not influenced in any way by the findings of the previous chapter.

A framework was created in Excel with a row for each participant, and columns that related to the different areas that were discussed in each of the semi-structured interviews. Participant’s responses along with brief quotes were recorded in the spreadsheet, with page and line numbers used to refer to relevant points in the interview transcripts. Responses were then colour-coded across participants to identify how themes identified in one area of the interview related to those themes and areas identified in other participants. Thus the analysis allowed for both emic and etic coding (192). Emic coding was applied to things participants described during the interview, such as drinking to achieve a ‘nice buzz’ or becoming ‘tipsy’ when they were talking about their drinking practices and experiences of drunkenness. Etic codes were developed by the researcher while analysing the transcripts. These were used to group participants’ responses into a category or theme, such as embodied aspects of drunkenness or describing drinking patterns as routine.

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7.7 Results

The 10 participants interviewed (7 men, 3 women) ranged in age between 25-90 years. Nine were employed at the time of the HSE interview, and one was retired. Participants lived in areas from all area deprivation quintiles, but most were from the highest two income quintiles (two withheld information on income). Almost all participants said that the week they completed the diary was, or probably was, a fairly typical week (9/10). One participant remembered drinking a lot more than usual because he attended a stag weekend while he was completing the diary.

Other participants described the week as not out of the ordinary but perhaps slightly lighter (2/10) or heavier (1/10) than an average week. This recall is slightly different to what HSE 2011 participants on average said at the end of the diary week (Section 6.7.1), but some change is to be expected given the small sample size and that the diary was completed in any one week in 2011 and the interviews took place in October and November 2012.

All participants stated that doing the drinking diary did not influence their alcohol consumption during that seven day period. Three people had changed their drinking patterns somewhat since the time when they did the diary, aiming to either drink less often, not drink alone, or simply cut down the quantity of alcohol they drank. All three of these people said that the reasons that they had changed their drinking patterns were wholly unconnected to the diary.