Dr Inge Kersbergen
Dr Inge Kersbergen is an SSA academic fellow in the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on social and environmental influences on health behaviour, particularly alcohol consumption. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Liverpool, where she investigated how visual attention to alcohol warning labels and advertising is associated with drinking behaviour. In her postdoctoral work, Inge examined how reductions to the serving size of alcohol and food can be used to decrease alcohol consumption and energy intake. During her fellowship, she is developing this line of work further to investigate how the packaging size of alcohol sold in shops influences drinking behaviour and how we may harness this effect to reduce alcohol consumption.
How packaging size influences drinking behaviour
Presentation link: Reducing alcohol packaging size to reduce alcohol consumption
Presentation audio: How packaging size influences drinking behaviour
Reducing the standard serving size of alcoholic drinks in pubs and bars may reduce alcohol consumption, but it is unclear how these findings would generalise to drinking in the home. Alcohol is served differently at home than in licensed premises, which is likely to influence the effectiveness of serving size interventions. In particular, alcohol served by the glass in the on-trade implies that the serving provided constitutes a single drink, but the number of individual servings in shop-bought, packaged alcohol is ambiguous, and alcohol consumers may perceive a wide range of container sizes as containing a single serving. Therefore, it is possible that serving size interventions in shops would only influence consumption when reducing the size of packaging that contains a single serving, but not when reducing the size of packaging that contains multiple servings (e.g., large bottles of wine or spirits). In this talk, I will discuss my ongoing research that investigates how the packaging size of shop-bought alcohol is associated with alcohol consumption and which range of packaging sizes is the optimum target for size interventions.
This work is funded by the Society for the Study of Addiction.