Social Norms Project
Group Social Norms Motivational Intervention with Interactive
Real-Time Feedback to Reduce Heavy Drinking in College Students
College drinking
- College drinking continues to be a national problem.
- Forty percent of college students report heavy drinking within
the prior month and students who engage in frequent binge drinking
have a high likelihood of experiencing negative alcohol-related consequences.
- One-quarter of students report that drinking has had a negative
impact on their academic life; from missed classes, poor test and
assignment performance, and falling behind in coursework.
Misperceptions of student norms
- Students’ misperceptions of the drinking behavior of their friends
and peers tend to negatively impact their own drinking consumption
rates.
- Correcting these misperceptions can help reduce heavy drinking
and reinforce moderate or abstaining behavior.
- Students are often skeptical about the salience of norms they receive
in normative feedback interventions, as the norms come from “unknown”
sources.
The current intervention
- Uses highly advanced technology to provides student members of
campus organizations (fraternities, sororities, service organizations,
and academic clubs) with live, real-time, group-specific normative
data based on the responses of other students in the group intervention
- Twenty groups of 40-200 individual participants (1000 intervention
participants, 1000 wait-list control group participants) will receive
the intervention
- Participants respond on individual hand-held devices that wirelessly
transmit their data to a central computer.
- Responses are displayed instantaneously for all participants to
see discrepancies between their perceptions of behaviors and attitudes
and the actual behaviors and attitudes of their group members.
- Group-specific and salient group nature of the intervention combines
with the real-time presentation of data to increase the credibility
of the normative feedback.
Implications
- It is anticipated that among the intervention groups, individual
and group misperceptions will be corrected and drinking will be reduced.
By correcting addressing the problem of peer misperception, this highly
advanced technological project can aid in reducing the heavy drinking
behavior of many college student