ALAC has extended the focus of its Youth Drinking Campaign to include the parents and caregivers of teenagers. In this regard, a communications programme targeted at the parents of Youth, 14 to 18, was launched on Sunday, April 16 2000.
This report presents the results of a Benchmark survey of parents of 14 to 18 year old Youth conducted prior to the commencement of the campaign. As such, it provides a baseline for the evaluation of the campaign. Online version only.
Purpose
The specific objectives of this Benchmark survey are defined as follows:
- (Using the framework provided by the previous qualitative research2) to accurately quantify the present situation as it relates to parents of teenagers on the issue of alcohol and their teenagers.
- To develop realistic goals and targets based on the present situation.
- To provide a basis on which to track and evaluate how parents’ attitudes, and hopefully their behaviour, in relation to their teenagers and alcohol change over time.
Methodology
This Benchmark survey is based on telephone interviews conducted with a total of 403 parents, or legal guardians, of teenagers aged 14 to 18 years. The interviewing was conducted between Thursday, 16 March and Wednesday, 5 April 2000, prior to the parent campaign beginning on Sunday, 16 April 2000.
Interviewing was carried out by fully supervised telephone interviewers, based at BRC Marketing & Social Research’s centralised interviewing facility in Wellington.
Interviews were conducted between the hours of 3.00 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. weekdays and during the weekends. A minimum of three calls (an initial call plus three call backs as necessary) to a sampled household were completed at different times of day, in an effort to contact a person qualified to participate. On average interviews took between 15 and 20 minutes to complete.
Respondents were interviewed if they were the parent or caregiver of a teenager aged 14 to 18 years and the teenager lived within their household for at least two days per fortnight. This criterion was applied to ensure that parents and guardians with shared care arrangements were also included in the sample.
Where a respondent had more than one teenager in the age bracket 14 to 18 years, questions were asked in relation to the oldest child.
Specific quotas were set so that Māori parents were over-sampled. This was so that the results for Māori parents could be examined with confidence (see Section 2.3 following).
Telephone numbers were derived from a combination of random dialing and the Electoral Enrolment Centre’s databases. In the case of the EEC’s databases, used specifically to efficiently interview Māori parents, individuals identifying as Māori were first randomly selected and then their contact addresses were tele-matched, using a service provided by Telecom. At the first point of contact, they were then asked whether they qualified (i.e. they were the parent of a teenager).
At a secondary level, quotas were also set by parental gender and the age of the oldest teenager within the 14 to 18 year age bracket.
Because Māori were over-sampled, results have been weighted to reflect the actual population. This is a common procedure in market research. The weighting parameters for this procedure were obtained from Statistics New Zealand, and are based on the ethnicity and gender breakdown of parents with children aged 14 to 18 years inclusive4.
Based on qualifying respondents, the response rate for the survey was 23%. This is relatively low, but was largely influenced by the complexity of the stratified sampling approach adopted. It should, however be noted that the response rate for Māori parents was relatively higher (33%).