Questions we asked and why

1. Interviews / Vox Pops
By Olivia Thorpe

2. Interviews:
 We interviewed two professionals around Solihull Sixth Form College in order to gain experts within our
documentary. This is because it would allow the documentary to have expert opinions which would gain
more trust and understanding, and also back up and create new arguments. We interviewed Julie
Maitland who is a physiologist and has direct experience with underage teenagers drinking within the
college. We also interviewed Janice Hamilton who is the vice principle of the Sixth Form and therefore
addresses and concerns that she has had within the college with underage drinking and also expresses
her own personal experiences and opinions.

3. Questions:
 Within our documentary we asked the experts a list of questions. We asked personally
before if they would allow us to record them and feature in our documentary.
Julie Maitland and Janice Hamilton:
Do you think underage drinking is more of a social issue? (influences are from friends etc)
Has other issues in society taken over the underage drinking problem (has other problems
made people forget about this particular issue?)
Do you agree with the current drinking age being 18?
Have you had any experience in helping the underage with drinking problems?
We asked the same questions to both professionals as we believed that they provide us with
all the detail needed and allow it to be much easier when editing as we can compare the
same results rather than inserting different questions.

4. Why did we ask them?
 We asked these questions as they allow us to gather the opinions of experts, for example when we asked
what they personally think of the legal drinking age being 18 and therefore can compare and analyse this
when editing our documentary. We also asked if they could bring in any of their own experiences they
have faced with underage drinking if they feel that they wanted to. This allowed us to see whether it was
a common issue and the serious problems that it can physically and emotionally have upon a person
from such a young age. Due to the fact that they are experts, we also asked if they believe any other
factors, such as peer pressure and drugs have taken over underage drinking and made it seem much
normal to drink underage. This is because they specalise with these problems and therefore can educate
people as to the affects that underage drinking can have upon people and what is the norm within our
society. I believe these expert interviews are highly important as they allow information which is
completely valid and can be trustworthy and therefore within this documentary allows the audience to be
educated by the experts. These questions are highly important as they allow us to gather information
which can be trusted and build up more information within the documentary.

5. Vox pops:
 We asked questions to both our primary and secondary audience in order to see the different attitudes
and opinions about the legal drinking age. We asked our primary audience in Solihull Sixth form as they
are all the right age, 17-18 on our break times. This allowed us to gain insight into teenagers attitudes
towards drinking and also see how many people do admit to drinking underage measuring how much of
an issue this is within society. We also asked in comparison what was the age people started drinking in
order to see how young people drink under 18.
We also asked our secondary audience a different list of questions to see how they feel about the
suitable legal drinking age and compare todays society attitude to how it was before in order to see how
society's views on alcohol, due to other factors such as drugs, have been classed as normal.

6. Questions:
 We asked different questions to our primary and secondary audience. Our primary audience are
teenagers and our secondary audience is adults roughly aged between 30-70.
Primary audience:
How old were you when you first drank alcohol?
Do you think the legal drinking age should be lowered?
Do you drink alcohol?
Secondary audience:
How old should children be to drink alcohol under supervision?
Do you think that the legal drinking age should be lowered?
How old were you when you first drank alcohol?
Do you think that teenagers drink alcohol too often?

7. Why did we ask them?
 We asked these questions as they allow a clear answer from our primary audience as to directly
what they think about alcohol within society and whether the legal drinking age is too high. It also
allows us to see how often people may drink underage and dismiss this law and still drink regardless
if they are not 18. Also, compare how young people were drinking as this gives us a rough indication
as to how prominent alcohol is within our society and how young it can be brought into peoples
life's.
With our secondary sources, we asked people if the drinking age should be lowered in order to see,
if they are older, whether their attitude changes. We also asked when they first started drinking to
see whether people today are drinking far earlier and not taking the legal drinking age seriously. This
means that we can compare our secondary audience to our primary as we are able to see the
different views within different society's and express the different attitudes on teenagers drinking
underage and without consent. This is important as it links directly to our documentary as it directly
addresses the argument which we have arise and measure how much attitudes have changed and
how frequently teenagers are drinking from a young age.

8. To conclude:
 To conclude, I believe that the interviews and vox pops that we had with our primary, secondary and
experts were important along with the questions that we asked as they allowed us to back up our
arguments and also get direct information as to what different attitudes of teenagers drinking underage
and opinions on whether the legal drinking age should be lowered. It allowed the purpose of our
documentary to build up as we gathered different attitudes and opinions to provide the viewers with
different views of our documentary and raise different points which we can then dwell and provide
more detail more.