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 [...]
Six key ingredients can increase success Social marketing uses conventional marketing tools and techniques with the aim not of making profit, but of promoting individual and group behavior changes that reap health or social benefits. There are 6 key elements in the social marketing approach that work best when used all together. A new literature [...]
This is the final Flu Tracking report for the 2014-2015 school year. In week 23 of influenza activity on campuses in the College Health Surveillance Network, 12 of 13 schools report 1 or more influenza-like illness cases. No schools had a percentage of cases that crossed the threshold of a CDC defined outbreak. At least one school in each region had [...]
Adrienne Keller, Ph.D., Research Director, National Social Norms Institute I recently had the opportunity to think about what I considered the essential ingredients to reach college students about health issues. First of all, I realized that my thoughts immediately went to health education and health promotion1 rather than personal clinical information. Secondly, four thoughts came very [...]
