School of Public Health, The University of Adelaide, Level 9, Adelaide Health & Medical Sciences Building, SA 5005, Australia.
Int J Drug Policy. 2018 May;55:80-87. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.02.023. Epub 2018 Mar 20.
In Australia, recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of temporary abstinence campaigns, in which people pledge to abstain from alcohol for a month while raising funds for charity. In addition to their fundraising aims, such initiatives have been viewed as tools for broader behavioural and cultural change around alcohol, encouraging participants to reflect on their drinking and make longer-term changes to their behaviour. The extent to which these initiatives promote enduring change may depend on how they portray the experience of temporarily abstaining from alcohol, and how they position participants.
We conducted a thematic discourse analysis of e-mails and website content from the 2016 editions of Dry July™ and Ocsober™, two Australian temporary abstinence campaigns.
Both campaigns featured an overarching portrayal of participation as a hero's journey through sobriety, with participants embarking on a quest to fundraise for their cause, and returning from their experience transformed. However, the campaigns differed in the way they positioned participants. Dry July™ consistently positioned participants as heroes, promoting both fundraising and reflection on longer-term behaviour changes. In contrast, Ocsober™ offered varied and inconsistent positions which were less likely to engage participants or prompt enduring changes in behaviour, for example positioning participants as alcohol abusers or on a detox.
Our findings emphasise the need to attend to how campaigns materials position participants in order to strengthen the effectiveness of such campaigns as health promotion tools.
在澳大利亚，近年来临时戒酒活动越来越受欢迎，参与者承诺在一个月内戒酒并为慈善机构筹款。除了筹款目标，这些举措还被视为在饮酒行为和文化方面进行更广泛的行为和文化变革的工具，鼓励参与者反思自己的饮酒行为，并对自己的行为做出更长期的改变。这些举措能否促进持久的改变，可能取决于它们如何描述暂时戒酒的体验，以及它们如何定位参与者。
我们对 2016 年澳大利亚临时戒酒活动“干七月”和“戒酒十月”的电子邮件和网站内容进行了主题话语分析。
两个活动都以戒酒英雄之旅的整体描绘来突出参与度，参与者开始为自己的事业筹款，并在经历后焕然一新。然而，这两个活动在定位参与者方面有所不同。“干七月”始终将参与者定位为英雄，既促进筹款，又鼓励对长期行为改变进行反思。相比之下，“戒酒十月”提供了不同且不一致的定位，不太可能吸引参与者或促使行为发生持久改变，例如将参与者定位为酗酒者或处于戒毒状态。
我们的研究结果强调需要关注活动材料如何定位参与者，以加强这些活动作为健康促进工具的有效性。
