By Whitney Carlson
BYU students learned about a professor?s experience researching youth, media and alcohol consumption as a Fulbright scholar in Oslo, Norway during a lecture Wednesday.
While a Fulbright scholar in fall 2003, Thomsen taught at the University of Oslo and compared results of his research with students surveyed in both Norway and the United States.
?It made for some interesting cross-cultural comparisons,? Thomsen said.
In 1975, Norway enacted a ban on all broadcasted alcohol advertisements for beverages containing over 2.5 percent alcohol. Norway also does not allow television commercials if the show is less than 45 minutes long, and only allows commercial breaks every 20 minutes after that.
Thomsen surveyed 972 students in the United States, who were 13 years old on average. He then worked with students at the Univer-sity of Oslo to survey 622 junior high school students, who were 13.2 years old on average. The survey focused on the effect of inciden-tal portrayal of alcohol use within the media on adolescents in Norway, especially within American programs. Some of the most popular television shows in Norway were ?Friends,? as well as ?Norwegian Bachelor,? ?24? and ?CSI: Miami.?
?The biggest challenge was getting everything translated into Norwegian,? Thomsen said about the research process.
Thomsen and those he worked with discovered that 37 percent of the Norwegian subjects and 32.2 percent of American subjects surveyed said that they had consumed at least one alcoholic beverage. 24.8 percent of Norwegian subjects and 7.4 percent of the Ameri-can subjects (taken largely from Utah and Idaho) had consumed alcohol in the previous 30 days. Thomsen also discovered that Norwe-gian students watched slightly more television than their American counterparts, which demonstrates that the media does have an impact on adolescents.
Thomsen concluded that the role of television and the media has the strongest impact on people with no personal experiences drink-ing alcohol. If students in the study watched television frequently, they were also more likely to associate drinking with popularity. Nor-wegian students, on average, were also more likely to believe that drinking would lead to an increase in popularity.
Thomsen said there is a relationship between family rules and the likelihood of alcohol consumption. If there are strong family rules, there is a decrease in alcohol consumption.
?That?s a good strong plug for the importance of family rules,? Thomsen said.
