Many people think that all students and young people practice the same dangerous drinking habits. But based on interviews with a range of Cambridge undergraduates it seems that Cambridge has a drinking bubble with slightly different practices. I conducted a number of hour-long interviews with students in Cambridge. These interviews are going to be used as part of a policy paper for The Wilberforce Society, who were commissioned by The Portman Group (the people who run the drinkaware campaign) to work on a collection of papers about the topic of student drinking. The interviews were conducted to find out about perceptions as well as practices of drinking. I found that the way we drink alcohol is intricately tied up with identity and how were express ourselves. The interviews show that if the government wants to tackle student drinking, it needs to take into account the ways in which we use alcohol to create ourselves. There were strong common trends in the perceptions and practices of the people interviewed, and these were wound into notions of class and status, and it is through recognising and changing these identifiers that an effective way of combating student binge-drinking could be achieved. 

Drinking is a culturally embedded ritual and its use legitimizes behaviour that society deems as un-healthy or un-acceptable. But this is not down to the magical properties of the drinks, but because we have ingrained associations between drinking and these behaviours.

The place of alcohol in society is as an enabler of unusual behaviour, and it is embedded strongly in how we identify ourselves. Tackling the ‘problem’ of drinking needs to change the cultural associations we have with the stuff, and this will not be based on monetary value alone.

Based on the interviews conducted there were striking similarities in attitudes: everybody interviewed said that they felt they drank too much, and yet the range that people drank also varied from a couple of drinks in a week, to students who binged on a couple of bottles in one night.

Students knew the potential dangers of drinking: people recounted stories of friends getting into unlicensed taxis, having to get their stomach pumped, and women commented on not wanting to walk back home alone after a night out. But, when I asked them about their favourite drink and what their ideal night out was they answered confidently. Clearly they know the potential dangers and choose to do it anyway. So what makes us do this?

Drinking has strong cultural associations, and it is a key signifier of identity. Gin and tonic and Champagne were mentioned by almost everyone as their favourite drink – Champagne was often said with a shy smile or a laugh. Both these types of drinks have connotations of a higher social status. As a corollary, people’s least enjoyed drink was often vodka. This often led onto a discussion about how horrible the ‘Basics’ version from Sainsbury’s was. Here, the drink was not aspirational and so not desired. What you drink identifies who you are. That people wanted to drink high status, and expensive, drinks illustrates that many of our drinking habits are determined by our attempts to signal things about ourselves.

It is significant to see that so much of how we drink alcohol is connected to identity. Even though many were at pains to point out that avoiding drinking alcohol was not a marker of exclusion, what people had as their drink of choice if they were drinking was pretty consistent, indicating that drinking is a strong sign of identity for Cambridge students. Because alcohol is so tied up and interwoven with identity – our class, our gender, our status – it is difficult to change people’s practices. These interviews have shown that students in Cambridge have individualized ideas about drinking alcohol but also that their practices generally conform to a trend in identity signifiers and the identity people try to both assume and convey. Because drinking is a personal activity a smaller scale approach by the government, which tackles our social associations with different kinds of drinks, would be the most effective at reducing the amount of units that students consume.