An open request for help/consultation here.  Please get in contact if you can …

Two researchers at Wrexham Glyndŵr University, Jess Muirhead and Prof. Vic Grout, have been commissioned by Alcohol Change UK to undertake a study of the effectiveness of online ‘age-gating’ mechanism’s in preventing under 18-year olds from purchasing alcohol via the Internet.  We have limited time to complete this research and produce our report so we are looking to conduct interviews with relevant actors (finance, producers, suppliers, distributers, retailers, web-designers, local authorities, customers, etc.) as quickly as possible.  Thus, we’re hoping we can arrange an opportunity to speak with people at their earliest convenience.  We can talk on the phone, face-to-face (travel costs permitting), using any online software or any other format that suits anyone.

We’d like to stress unequivocally that anonymity will we be guaranteed throughout.  We will not record these discussions and no individual attribution will appear in our final report.  Although we might takes the roughest of notes during the interview, these will be only to remind us of points to follow up on to guide us in our ongoing research.  This is essentially a fact-finding exercise; certainly not any sort of ‘undercover operation’.  There will be no ‘blaming or shaming’: we simply want to get a clearer idea of what processes are in place; what works and what doesn’t.  We’re also naturally very interested indeed in others’ thoughts on how future processes could be improved.

So we’d be extremely grateful to anyone who could spare half an hour or so to help us with this research.  If you can, and considering the element of urgency in this, could you please get back to us quickly by any of the following means:

• Jess Muirhead: Jessica.Muirhead@glyndwr.ac.uk, 01978 293541
• Vic Grout: Vic.Grout@glyndwr.ac.uk, 01978 293203

Thank you in advance and we look forward to talking to you.

Yours,

Jess Muirhead & Vic Grout, Department of Computing, Wrexham Glyndŵr University