Alcohol in life story interviews with Finnish people aged 90 or over: Stories of gendered morality

Based on an analysis of interview transcripts, this article aims to find out how alcohol use was constructed in narrative life story interviews with people aged 90 or over. Employing the ideas of social constructionism and discourse analysis, we identified the moralistic repertoire, destiny and threat repertoire, social participation repertoire and health repertoire. Alcohol use was largely constructed as a moral issue. However, the moral repertoire was used clearly differently for and by men and women, hence the conclusion that alcohol use was talked about as a characteristically gendered issue. The culturally shared meanings attached to alcohol use served as resources upon which our narrators drew in their accounts, but by making choices between different modes of speech they made sense of their lives and life histories.