Evaluation Of A Social Norms Marketing Campaign To Reduce High-Risk Drinking At The University Of Mississippi - .Statistical Data Included - )

American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, May, 2001 by Laura Gomberg, Shari Kessel Schneider, William DeJong

INTRODUCTION

Heavy episodic drinking on college and university campuses is a widespread phenomenon (1). High-risk drinking creates a host of problems for both the students who engage in such behaviors and their peers, including academic difficulties, injury, property damage, unplanned and unprotected sexual activity, or trouble with campus police (2). Finding effective ways of addressing the problem of high-risk drinking has been and remains a prominent issue for many institutions of higher education.

Traditional responses to the problem of high-risk drinking have included student education and counseling (3). While helping to increase individual knowledge and awareness, these approaches have had little apparent effect on students' alcohol consumption. Recognizing the limitations of past efforts, new approaches to reducing high-risk drinking have begun to focus on changing the physical, social, economic, and legal environment that drives alcohol use (4).

A major factor influencing students' decisions about alcohol consumption is their perceptions of campus drinking norms (5). Typically, college students greatly overestimate the number of their peers who engage in high-risk drinking, both nationally and on their own campus. The idea that many other students drink excessively may cause students to feel both justified and pressured to consume more alcohol than they would if they believed instead that their peers drank more moderately. Thus, shifting these perceptions of social norms to reflect drinking patterns more realistically could be an effective means of reducing high-risk drinking on college campuses (6).

Working from this idea, various prevention programs have sought to use social marketing strategies to change students' perceptions of campus drinking norms. Social marketing can be defined as the application of basic marketing principles to the design and implementation of programs and information campaigns that advance social causes such as alcohol and other drug prevention (7).

The first such campaign was conducted at Northern Illinois University (NIU) (Dekalb, IL). Students were informed through a series of campus newspaper advertisements and on-campus skits about the true rate of high-risk alcohol consumption among their peers, which was far less than what students typically estimated. Survey data showed that, after the campaign's first year, students offered lower (and more accurate) estimates of the high-risk drinking rate among NIU students. Students also reported a sizable decline in high-risk drinking, even while national rates continued relatively unchanged (8).

These promising results have inspired social norms marketing campaigns at several other colleges and universities in the United States. It should be noted, however, that the evaluation of the NIU campaign has several shortcomings. First, the surveys were administered to convenience samples of students. Second, there are no data from carefully selected comparison schools. The comparison against national data is informative, but not definitive. Third, process data were not collected to monitor campus-, community-, or state-level contextual factors that might have affected the measured outcomes.

Based on the NIU campaign, the Golden Key National Honor Society developed a social norms marketing campaign, Just the Facts (JTF), which was pilot tested on eight university campuses across the United States, including the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), during the 1995-1996 school year (9). (Other pilot test sites included Colorado State University, Fort Collins; Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti; Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA; State University of New York at Geneseo; Tufts University, Boston, MA; University of California at Los Angeles; and University of Wisconsin at La Crosse.)

This article reports an in-depth analysis of the results of the Ole Miss JTF campaign. This particular campaign was chosen due to the exhaustive sampling methodology used for the student surveys (see Methods section below) that was not feasible at the other seven campuses.

CAMPAIGN OVERVIEW

The Ole Miss chapter of the Golden Key National Honor Society implemented the Just the Facts campaign during the 1995-1996 school year following guidelines developed by Golden Key's national office (9). To begin, the University of Mississippi conducted the Core Alcohol and Drug Survey in April 1994 to assess baseline levels of student drinking. These data were then used to create specific messages about actual student drinking norms. The campaign was implemented twice during the 1995-1996 school year, once in the fall semester and again in the spring semester, with each phase lasting 8 consecutive weeks. The campaign messages did not address freshmen explicitly, but freshmen were intended to be the primary target audience.

The campaign relied primarily on advertisements in the campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian. Focus groups had verified that students saw the paper as a credible and reliable source of information. Surveys conducted for the evaluation (see below) confirmed that the paper is widely read. In the pretest, 61.1% of the surveyed freshmen reported reading the paper "every time" or "most of the time," with these figures rising to 70.0% and then 74.1% in the two posttests conducted later in the school year. Very few students (4.6% at pretest, 1.2% at posttest 1, and 0.9% at posttest 2) reported "never" reading the school newspaper.