A context-specific social norms intervention to reduce college student alcohol use: manipulating reference groups to target tailgating students
Date
2015
Authors
Anthenien, Amber M., author
Aloise-Young, Patricia, advisor
Henry, Kimberly, committee member
Cross, Jennifer, committee member
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Abstract
Alcohol use among college students may result in a variety of ill effects for students and their community. The social norms approach is commonly employed to address these issues, targeting individuals' perceptions of normative consumption. However, normative interventions have rarely been implemented in specific situations or contexts that encourage alcohol consumption, when college students need prevention programming the most. Moreover, researchers have often ignored the important gender differences that exist in alcohol use by providing gender-neutral norms. In the current investigation, a randomized controlled trial was conducted in the Fall of 2013 with three experimental conditions: a no-treatment control, a context-specific social norm intervention, and a combined context-specific and gender-specific social norm intervention. Psychology students (N = 216, Mage = 19.11, 72.6% female) were exposed to one of the experimental conditions and completed pre-test assessments online 48 hours prior to the football game they intended to tailgate, and then responded to follow-up measures within 7 days after the football game. Results indicate that the combined intervention may be a promising technique for reducing college students' perceived norms and alcohol consumption in tailgating situations. Specifically, students in the combined condition perceived their peers drank less alcohol while tailgating. In addition, females in the context and combined conditions reported consuming less alcohol than participants in the control group. However, due to small sample sizes in the present study, these effects failed to reach conventional levels of statistical significance. The implications for designing effective normative interventions are discussed.
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Subject
college students
tailgating
social norms
alcohol use