CONFERENCE. The project Women and Alcohol in Gothenburg (WAG) has provided detailed knowledge about young women’s relationship to alcohol, their adolescence and their adult life. This is the thirtieth year of the project, which recently celebrated with the conference Women and Alcohol in Gothenburg.
The conference was held on November 23, to celebrate the WAG project. During the last thirty years, over 1,600 women have had 3,200 interviews on issues related to alcohol, adolescence and adulthood. In these in-depth interviews, women have had the opportunity to talk about relationships with family and other people, mental and physical health, abuse and problems, work, use of medication, sexuality, and substance abuse. It has provided us a detailed understanding of women primarily from the Greater Gothenburg area over thirty years.
The conference was jointly organized by the University of Gothenburg’s Section for Epidemiology and Social Medicine (EPSO) and the Centre for Education on Addiction (CERA), the County Temperance Association of Västra Götaland and the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland. The conference, held in the University’s large auditorium, attracted over 200 participants, mainly from Västra Götaland and Halland, but also travelers from farther afield. The participants represented organizations with a focus on both prevention and treatment of alcohol and its harmful effects. There were representatives from the private, municipal, regional and state levels. Participants also included interested researchers, students, and the general public.
It was noisy during registration and during breaks around the coffee tables and buffet as participants eagerly discussed their thoughts from the lectures or took the opportunity to make contacts for future collaborations.
The conference began with opening remarks from the moderator Robert Kaskas from the County Temperance Association and then a talk by Gunnel Hensing from EPSO and Frederick Spak, who previously worked at EPSO but who currently works as a consultant in psychiatry for addicts.
Fredrik began the WAG project and was the principal researcher, but a few years ago he passed responsibility for the project on to Gunnel. Under the heading “Alcohol – a gender story!? 30 Years of Women and Alcohol in Gothenburg”, they described the background to the project, where a need for research on women was highlighted as a reason for starting the study. Traditionally, research had generally used men as the standard and was often conducted both on and by men. They also knew that there were some gender differences in how drinking took place, what was drunk and reasons for drinking. This is why they needed to learn more about women and their alcohol consumption. The project has followed the same women from adolescence to later in life, but it has also allowed comparison of adolescents in the late 1980s with those of today.
Gunnel and Fredrik showed an increasing proportion of women drinking alcohol to calm nerves, an increasing proportion who feel inferior and ashamed of their drinking, and an increasing proportion who feel they have alcohol problems in more recent generations of adolescents.
