Moderating Social Norms Interventions: Field Experiment

描述（由申请人提供）：社会规范干预策略在大学校园中被广泛使用，以减少酗酒和酒精相关的危害。有强有力的证据表明，学生误解（高估）了同龄人的饮酒标准，并且认为规范压力导致了酗酒。通过向饮酒者提供准确的规范信息，社会规范方法试图改变人们错误的规范信念，从而减少饮酒量。然而，对社会规范营销策略在大学校园实施的评估是对社会规范理论在减少饮酒方面的普遍适用性的较差测试。该研究建议通过实验来检验在一个受控的、真实的饮酒环境中为饮酒者提供规范的饮酒信息的影响。年轻的美国居民将在圣地亚哥的墨西哥边境接受抽样调查，然后再进入蒂华纳。测量参与者的饮酒计划和规范信念，然后将参与者随机分配到实验条件中，在实验条件下，参与者将获得不同类型的准确的规范饮酒信息。这些参与者从提华纳回来后将被重新采样，他们的饮酒水平将通过BAG呼气测试客观测量。该研究将检验参与者在提华纳的饮酒行为是否受到规范信息的影响。虽然社会规范研究通常是在大学生身上进行的，但这项研究将是新颖的，因为它将在不同的饮酒人群中测试社会规范干预。除了测试短暂的、面对面的规范饮酒干预是否会影响短期饮酒外，我们还将操纵假设的几个变量来调节干预的影响。沟通说服理论认为，规范性信息的说服力应该在接受者注意到它、相信它并相信它与个人相关的程度上更强。我们将研究是否在参与者饮酒的影响中改变规范性信息的说服力属性。本研究将有助于对社会规范机制的理论理解，以及如何提高其对现实生活干预的适用性。公共健康相关性：大学生饮酒对大学校园构成严重威胁。社会规范营销策略被广泛用于减少校园酒精消费；然而，这些策略的效果好坏参半。这项研究将有助于确定可能提高社会规范干预效果的因素。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Social norms intervention strategies are widely used on college campuses to reduce heavy drinking and alcohol-related harm. There is strong evidence that students misperceive (overestimate) the level of drinking that is normative among their peers, and it is argued that normative pressure contributes to heavy drinking. By providing drinkers with accurate normative information, social norms approaches attempt to change peoples' erroneous normative beliefs and, consequently, reduce their drinking. However, evaluations of social norms marketing strategies as implemented on college campuses are poor tests of the general applicability of social norms theory to reducing drinking. The research proposes to examine experimentally the impact of providing drinkers with normative drinking information in a controlled, real-world drinking environment. Young U.S. residents will be sampled at the Mexican border at San Diego before they cross into Tijuana. Participants' drinking plans and normative beliefs will be measured, and then participants will be randomly assigned to experimental conditions where they will receive different types of accurate normative drinking information. These same participants will be resampled as they return from Tijuana and their drinking levels will be measured objectively through a BAG breath test. The research will examine whether participants' drinking while in Tijuana was impacted by the normative information. Although social norms research typically has been conducted on college students, this research will be novel in that it will test a social norms intervention on a diverse drinking population. In addition to testing whether a brief, face-to-face normative drinking intervention affects short-term alcohol consumption, we will manipulate several variables hypothesized to moderate the impact of that intervention. Communication persuasion theory suggests that normative information should be more persuasive to the extent that recipients attend to it, believe the information, and believe that it is personally relevant. We will examine whether varying the persuasive properties of the normative information effects in the impact of participants' alcohol consumption. This research will contribute both to the theoretical understanding of social norms mechanisms, as well as address ways to increase its applicability to real-life interventions. Public Health Relevance: Student drinking poses a serious threat on college campuses. Social norms marketing strategies are widely used to reduce alcohol consumption on campus; however, the effectiveness of these strategies has been mixed. This research will help identify factors that might improve the efficacy of social norms interventions.