Social Norms Approach - History

History

Since the 1986 study in which Berkowitz and Perkins reported the misperceptions about alcohol consumption amongst college students, the use and study of the social norms approach has grown. It has been used as a prevention technique for a variety of levels of prevention: universal, with large populations like entire college campuses; selective, with targeted subpopulations, and indicated, with individuals.

The first social norms intervention was implemented in 1989 by Michael Haines at Northern Illinois University, which targeted a universal campus population and over the years has shown significant success in terms of increasing healthy behaviors. This research at Northern Illinois University was done with a $64,000 grant from the U.S.Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). Subsequent funding of social norms marketing projects at institutions like the University of Virginia suggests that the industry has realized that Social Norms Marketing does not reduce drinking and is thus worth their investment in such research to appear that they are working on prevention while actually helping to sell their product. Many other universities have since followed suit and have had similar success in the reduction of high-risk drinking behaviors, such as Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the University of Arizona, and University of North Carolina, to name a few.

Since these achievements have become well-known, the social norms approach has been used successfully to reduce smoking, drinking and driving, and HIV risk behaviors, and to increase seat belt use.

It has also gained widespread use targeting adolescents and high school students, and has been used in an attempt to reduce drinking and smoking behaviors amongst those populations. Recently, interventions have been tested to reduce sexual assault, and the results were reported to be "promising." However, given that social norms marketing efforts were reported at a conference of alcohol educators by DeJong to correspond to increased drinking behavior, one should be extremely cautious about using social norms marketing with sexual assault, lest one risk an increase in that domain.