Drink It’s Not What You Think
The Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores have published their final report on some social norms work looking at alcohol consumption that has been going on in Sefton.
They say:
Results from the interim report (Burrows et al., 2009) and the post-intervention survey support the notion that young people tend to overestimate the alcohol consumption of their peers compared with their actual level of consumption. This echoes the school project with 14-16 year olds (Lightowlers et al. 2009) and literature published elsewhere (Neighbours et al., 2007).
Oddly the largest proportion (55%) of those who said they saw the campaign claim to have seen it on television, but there hadn't been any televised coverage or advertising. The authors conclude there may have been some confusion with other campaigns.
The report also makes it clear that the normative messages only included consumptive norms and did not have any messages about injunctive norms (ie the perception of the acceptability of others’ behaviours).
It also points out there wasn't a control group that was measured.
In terms of behaviour the authors say:
Overall the research identified little or no change in the behaviour of the participants subsequent to the social norms campaign. However, we did identify a weakening of the relationship between own consumption and perception of closest friends’ consumption, potentially changing students’ social norms in relation to proximal reference points.
They suggest that earlier work in school showed more promise as a prevention intervention.
This leads to the following recommendations:
- Any future campaigns are developed to be highly visible to the college population not-withstanding restrictions imposed by the college) to ensure that all campaign messages are viewed by the cohort.
- Materials are branded in a distinctive and original format so as to overcome any confusion between this campaign and others.
- The presentation of campaign materials continues to be bolstered by interactive, inter-personal and community approaches to further communicate and cement the actual social (college) alcohol norms and thus displace common misapprehensions.
- Campaigns utilised both descriptive and injunctive norms in any further presentation (this may provide additional benefits in the reduction of alcohol consumption than relying on a harm reduction approach alone).
- Interventions should also employ age appropriate materials and techniques, so that messages are salient to the cohort. Further, any such interventions should be delivered to young people who are at the optimum age for engagement.
- Any future evaluations of any such projects should seek to overcome the limitations highlighted here, for example, through the use of a control college or population, and increasing the size of the surveyed sample.
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This blog tries to pick up relevant media and research stories about drug education. It mainly focuses on information in England as this is the geographical remit for the Drug Education Forum. We welcome comments that are on topic.Categories
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