Moderating Social Norms Interventions: Field Experiment

描述(申请人提供)：社会规范干预策略被广泛应用于大学校园，以减少酗酒和与酒精相关的伤害。有强有力的证据表明，学生们误解(高估)了同龄人中正常的饮酒水平，并认为规范压力导致了大量饮酒。通过为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，从而减少他们的饮酒。然而，对大学校园实施的社会规范营销策略的评估很难检验社会规范理论在减少饮酒方面的普遍适用性。这项研究建议对在受控的、真实的饮酒环境中为饮酒者提供规范饮酒信息的影响进行实验研究。年轻的美国居民在进入提华纳之前，将在圣地亚哥的墨西哥边境接受抽样。参与者的饮酒计划和规范信念将被测量，然后参与者将被随机分配到实验条件，在那里他们将获得不同类型的准确规范饮酒信息。当这些参与者从提华纳回来时，他们将被重新抽样，他们的饮酒水平将通过袋子呼气测试进行客观测量。这项研究将检查参与者在提华纳期间饮酒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，因为它将测试对不同饮酒人群的社会规范干预。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，我们还将操纵几个假设变量，以缓和干预的影响。传播说服理论认为，规范性信息应该更有说服力，只要接受者注意到它，相信信息，并相信它与个人相关。我们将考察不同说服性的规范性信息是否会对参与者的饮酒行为产生影响。这项研究将有助于从理论上理解社会规范机制，并解决如何提高其对现实生活干预的适用性。与公共健康相关：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应用于减少校园饮酒；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.