Robin G W RoomEmeritus

About me

Robin Room was the director of the Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs at Stockholm University and a Professor in sociology 1999-2005. He remains affiliated with and retains an appointment at SoRAD centre in the Public Health Sciences department.  But since 2006 his primary appointments have been in Australia, at the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research (CAPR), initially at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre and now at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He is a professor at La Trobe University and an honorary professor at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne.

Topics of interest to hi include: Alcohol and drug policy, social, cultural and epidemiological studies of alcohol, drugs and gambling behaviour, social worlds and subcultures of heavy use, and social responses to alcohol and drug problems.

For SoRAD, Robin Room has worked in recent years on the ALICE RAP project, a multisite European Union project concerned with redefining addiction across substances and behaviours.  In this context, among other work he coedited and contributed to The Impact of Addictive Substances and Behaviours on Individual and Societal Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2015), wrote an introduction to a journal issue of historical studies on addiction terminology and the social handling of problematic substance use in Nordic societies (Nordic Studies on Alcohol & Drugs, 2014), co-authored papers on concepts and terms for addiction in English and in Nordic societies, and co-authored with Jenny Cisneros Örnberg a paper on the governance of addictions at the international level.  Room is also a coauthor of the second edition of Drug Policy and the Public Good (2018), in an international group of scholars led by Tom Babor; and of a new book on the epidemiology of gambling problems and on the evidence on strategies to reduce such problems, Setting Limits: Gamblng, Science and Public Policy (Oxford UP, 2019). This book, the product of an international group led by Tom Babor and Pekka Sulkunen, also involving Cisneros Örnberg from SoRAD.

A good deal of Room’s past work can be found at the Selected publications website.

Research projects

Ongoing

Completed

Responding to and Reducing Gambling Problems Studies (REGAPS)

This programme offers an overall coverage of topics of immediate interest in Swedish gambling research today, based on five different work packages.

Youth, health and risk-taking

Youth, health and risk-taking: exploring how declining substance use and increasing mental health problems among young people are related to their everyday life concerns and practices

Why are young people drinking less than earlier?

Understanding the mechanisms leading to young people drinking less than the generations before holds implications for approaches to reducing alcohol consumption at the population level in an ongoing way. The project is focuses attention on individual, developmental and social factors of all adolescents, including light drinkers and those who do not drink.