Our colleagues at "The Well" at Virginia Commonwealth University recently found an interesting way to capture students' opinion of the Stall Seat Journals (SSJ) that are a core part of the social norms intervention program there: Linda Hancock, PhD, CFNP, RN, Director of the Well, describes what she did: "I just gave out 3x5 cards [...]
From our colleagues "across the pond" comes this request for help with their exploratory research into social norms and "digital addiction": Dear colleagues, We are currently undertaking work in social norms aspects of digital addiction, lead by my colleague Dr Raian Ali. As part of this work we are conducting some exploratory studies, if you [...]
"We flinch at the truth that most rapists are less likely to point a gun than to proffer a plastic cup of booze..." Nicholas Kristof, NYT Sunday Review" When the Rapist Doesn't See It As Rape. Nicholas Krisof is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, a respected journalist and the father of college [...]
Here's some useful information about powdered alcohol (Palcohol) from Kristen Kidd Donovan, MPH, the very experienced Assistant Director of Substance Abuse Prevention for the Wellness Center at Virginia Commonwealth University: In an informal email, Kristen wrote: I spent some time this week wrapping my head around this problem, and I'm ready to cross it off [...]
This interesting small experiment randomly assigned 101 U.K. college students with excessive drinking to one of four conditions. In each condition, the students received one message a week for four weeks. The messages varied by condition: official alcohol consumption guidelines how their consumption compared to official guidelines how their consumption compared to the sample mean where their [...]
We've just added an important new resource: a complete archive of the Report on Social Norms, edited by Alan Berkowitz, PhD, published from 2002-2005. The 37 issues and working papers cover many important topics in social norms, including interventions on diverse health behaviors for diverse populations, summaries of conference presentations, and the perspectives of leading researchers. The Archive [...]
We mentioned our Google Scholar alert for "normative misperceptions" in a previous post about a paper that was interesting but not directly relevant. Here is a prime example of the opposite result from our alert: a paper that is interesting and directly relevant. From the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of [...]
We have a Google Scholar alert for publications related to "normative misperceptions." The results are always interesting, even though many are not relevant. We try to do blog posts on the most relevant ones. Every once in a while, there is one that is not directly relevant but that we find interesting in its own [...]
Dear colleagues, The April issue of Health Communication Science Digest (HCSD or Digest) is now available at http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/ScienceDigest/index.html. This month in the Digest several authors report on health communication campaigns and/or interventions conducted using a variety of media (Antonishak, et al.; Aventin, et al.; Ayala, et al.; Eden, et al.; Hofstetter, et al.; Larsson; Perez, [...]
Bystander Training for Drinking Situations among College Students How can bystanders become rescuers? Bystander training programs help give individuals skills and confidence to intervene in risky situations like sexual violence, bullying, drug overdoses, and drunk driving. However, people intervening often face dilemmas in balancing concern for the safety of others with maintaining their own social [...]
