Replicated Findings of an Evaluation of a Brief Intervention Designed to Prevent High-Risk Drinking among First-Year College Students: Implications for Social Norming Theory.

Abstract

College students were randomly assigned to receive either (a) standard alcohol programming (SAP) or (b) SAP plus an intervention designed to change perceptions of alcohol norms (PAN). Effects of the intervention delivered during one class period (i.e., 55 minutes) were assessed using pre- and post-intervention surveys about personal alcohol use and perceptions of other students' drinking. Compared to students in the SAP only condition (N = 472), those receiving the PAN intervention (N = 402) reported significant reductions in perceived peer drinking; but minimal differences in serf-reported drinking. These results replicate the findings from the previous year of implementation of the PAN intervention and raise concerns about the practical and empirical validity of brief social norming interventions designed to reduce drinking among college students. INTRODUCTION There has been a dramatic proliferation of interventions that use techniques based on social norming theory (SNT) to attempt to reduce problematic drinking among college students. According to one estimate, at least 20% of colleges in the United States have implemented an intervention based on SNT (Wechsler, Lee, Kuo, & Lee, 2000). However, in a recent comprehensive review of individual-focussed interventions designed to reduce problematic drinking among college students, Latimer and Cronce (2002) reported that conclusions about interventions based on SNT are premature because the literature is severely limited in terms of both the quantity and the quality of published studies. Thus, it seems that there is very little evidence to support the widespread dissemination of social norming programs (Smith, 2003). Further concern about the practical utility of social norming theory comes from our pilot research (Smith, Stamper, & Gant, in press). This randomized, post-test only study compared the effects of a brief (50 minute) small group intervention designed to change perceptions of drinking norms (PAN) with a standard alcohol presentation (SAP) that focussed on education about consequences of drinking. Compared to SAP, post-intervention measures found that the PAN intervention was associated with lower estimates of the frequency of peer drinking. However, there were no statistically significant differences in three measures of self-reported drinking: quantity, frequency, and rates of binge drinking. The results of Smith et al. (in press) raise some concerns about the validity of SNT as an intervention model for college student drinking. The critical proposition of SNT interventions is that the effect of the social norming intervention on changes in drinking should be mediated by changes in perceptions. Thus, the proximal target of intervention is perceptions and the distal target is drinking. No other causal mechanisms are postulated by social norming theory, so the effects of a SNT intervention should be completely mediated by changes in perceptions. Changes in perceptions without corresponding changes in drinking, which was the pattern of results in Smith et al. (in press) and at least one other study (Thombs & Hamilton, 2002), raises questions about the practical utility of changing perceptions. Moreover, studies that find changes in drinking, but not in perceptions (Schroeder & Prentice, 1998) raise questions about the theoretical validity of the proposition that the putative effects of SNT interventions are mediated by changes in perceptions. Thus, there is some preliminary research from randomized studies that suggest that there may be some serious problems with the theoretical validity of interventions based on SNT. However, the preliminary randomized studies suffer from a number of methodological limitations (Berkowitz, 2003). Moreover, the results of the preliminary randomized studies contrast with significant changes in perceptions and drinking seen in several campus campus-wide implementations (Berkowitz, 2003). …