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Saturday, 16 November 2013
Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to define social norms theory and apply to specific high risk behaviors of patients or select populations.
Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to identify characteristics of high risk behaviors in adolescents.
Social norms media campaigns have been successful at lowering actual high risk behaviors and traditionally have been used in alcohol, drug and tobacco campaigns. In order to lower the high risk behaviors the normative gap of the behavior must be closed between the perceived and actual norm. To determine the actual and perceived norms of high risk sexual behaviors, a thorough review of the literature was conducted and southeastern United States data were reviewed from the American College Health Association- National College Health Assessment. Data were selected and contributed to print materials for a poster campaign on a public southeastern university’s campus. Four different poster designs were launched on campus. After six weeks, there was an electronic survey sent to all students to evaluate the campaign based on believability, retention of the messages, recall of the poster designs, and perceptions of high risk sexual behaviors. This data were then analyzed for results to see if the perceptions of peer high risk sexual behaviors have a narrower normative gap than the previously analyzed data. The participants who did not believe the message had a higher perceived norm for the number of sexual partners the typical student had in the past year (M=2.71) while those who believed the message had a significantly lower (t=7.116; p<.001) perceived norm (M=2.11). Those who recalled seeing the posters with the selected message had a significantly lower perceived number of partners (t=3.576; p<.001) (M=2.20) as compared to those students who say they did not see any of these posters (M=2.48). Additionally, students’ perceptions of perceived number of peer partners in the Spring 2008 southern regional ACHA-NCHA data were significantly different from the post-intervention data (t=28.408; p<.001). There were fewer number of perceived partners for the students’ post-intervention survey (M=2.39) than the 2008 southern regional data (M=3.52).