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Proactive Environmental Approach

Social Norms is a proactive approach that addresses problems before they start or before they become highly problematic. As an environmental approach it seeks to impact social and cultural environments as the way to then influence individuals.

 

Getting the Healthy Message Out

Normative messages are designed for delivery using various media and promotion strategies in order to effectively reach a target population and promote its accurate norms of health and safety. Once perceptions become more accurate and truthful, individuals in the healthy majority are empowered to “remain healthy”. At the same time, those in the not yet healthy minority begin to gravitate towards the healthy and desirable behaviors of the majority.

 

Outcomes Orientation

Projects in the United States, Canada and England have used this science-based approach to achieve statistically significant behavioral change.

Furthermore, and more importantly, Social Norms Interventions have proven to effect reductions in the negative consequences of unhealthy or unsafe behaviors.

 

Being science and data based, Social norms provides for measurability of all aspects of each intervention project. These outcome measurements are of utmost importance to all stakeholders involved including funders, project staff and most importantly, the population being served.

 

A sample graph of a Social Norms intervention would look like the following:

Intervention Tactics

Social Norms interventions are most commonly applied using social marketing techniques. Other successful tactics have included curriculum infusion, creating press coverage, policy development, and small group interventions.

 

Applications

The first issue to be addressed using Social Norms Theory was that of student alcohol consumption on university campuses in the United States in the late 1980’s. Since then the intervention has evolved and become well proven and refined. The method is used by over 200 universities in the United States as well as high level national organizations including The American Cancer Society, The American Lung Association, The U.S. Air Force and more. Today some of the applications of Social Norms Theory include but are not limited to issues such as smoking, illicit drug use, violence, tax compliance, and road safety.

Introduction

A significant shift in public health promotion strategies is underway. For the last few decades, health promotion has been largely based on informing the public about the negative consequences of harmful behaviors. Yet there is little or no evidence to suggest that this approach changes behavior. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the usual “scare tactics” actually can make the situation worse.

 

When an intervention emphasizes problem behavior without acknowledging the actual healthy norm, it may foster the erroneous belief that problems are worse than is actually the case and inadvertently contribute to the problem it is trying to solve.

 

In contrast, interventions based on Social Norms Theory focus on the healthy attitudes and behavior of the majority and try to increase it, while also using information about healthy norms to guide interventions with abusers.

 

Social Norms Theory

The social norms approach was first suggested by H. Wesley Perkins and Alan Berkowitz in 1986 in an analysis of student alcohol use patterns. In this study they determined that college students regularly overestimated the extent to which their peers were supportive of permissive drinking behaviors. They found that this overestimation predicted how much individuals drank.

 

As a result, they recommended that prevention efforts focus on providing students with accurate information on peer drinking attitudes and behavior (Perkins & Berkowitz, 1986; Berkowitz & Perkins, 1987a). This represented a radical departure from traditional intervention strategies that provided information on abuse and negative consequences and concentrated primarily on the identification, intervention, and treatment of problem users.

 

Social norms theory states that much of people’s behavior is influenced by their perception of how other members of their social group behave. According to social norms theory, people tend to misperceive, i.e., exaggerate, the negative health behavior of their peers. If people think harmful behavior is typical, they are more likely to engage in that type of behavior. Alternatively, by educating a group about healthy behaviors that are in fact the usual practice among their peers, behavior can be affected in a positive manner.

 

 

Social Norms Marketing

Community based health promotion in Israel.