This fall, students will have some new information plastered on bulletin boards and in the student media sources.
A "social norms campaign" to educate students about alcohol use on campus has been undertaken by the Health Resources staff and the Dean of the College Office.
The idea is to change the community's view of what norms are surrounding alcohol use on campus.
"My hope is that students will have better information within easy reach so they'll understand what the average Dartmouth student does and the social norms consist of," Dean of the College James Larimore said.
"Often they'll remember the worst and not the majority of people who came, had a good time, and left," Director of Health Resources Gabrielle Lucke said. "Usually the stories that get perpetuated are about the small percentage of high risk users at an event."
Lucke, who has been working on the program with Coordinator of Alcohol and Drug Education Programs Margaret Smith, said that the idea isn't to get people to stop drinking, but to promote safe use of alcohol.
"When people talk about reducing high risk use, they immediately assume that it's an anti-drinking campaign," Lucke said. "The media campaign is to help raise people's awareness as to what the actual behaviors are."
Lucke emphasized she would not want Dartmouth to be a dry campus.
"I hope it would mean even the opposite; that we would have some normalized alcohol use on campus," Lucke said.
The first poster states, "Most Dartmouth students say that having alcohol at a party isn't that important to them."
This statistic comes from a survey that found only about 15 percent of students said having alcohol at a party was important to them. Most of the statistics that will be used in the campaign were gathered from the Social Life Survey conducted in 1997. Some additional research will be conducted in the fall, according to Lucke.
The social norms strategy was developed in the 1980s by Michael Haines at Northern Illinois University. His program and similar ones across the country claim success rates at reducing binge drinking by as much as 44 percent.
A key part of the social norms approach is that students are involved in the design of the posters and ads and select the content, allowing members of the target audience to use what they think would be most effective in communicating the message, Lucke said.
However, some students were not sure how effective this would be.
"It's just a poster and no one's going to pay attention to a poster. I saw it and I just walked right by," Gannon Sungar '02 said.
Another student said he was not sure about the accuracy of the information being disseminated.
"I think there's a lot of skepticism about where these statistics come from," Andrew Gray '01 said. "For me it really doesn't change my perspective because I don't really go to parties for the alcohol anyway. I think among those who do, their attitude will be dismissive."
Not all students agree that the campaign will be ineffective.
"This summer I heard the statistic that Dartmouth falls in the middle as far as alcohol abuse and I was certainly shocked," Jenny Viele '00 said. "I do think that if students knew that, possibly attitudes and behavior could change."
"But it's not going to change the people that are set on binge drinking," she added.
The adoption of the social norms strategy of alcohol education and the current media and poster campaign are another step in the ongoing expansion of the College's alcohol and drug education programs.
Beginning this year, Smith's position, which was introduced as a halftime position last year, has been expanded to a full-time position. The department has also been allocated funds for a halftime administrative assistant.
Lucke said that this allocation of funds represents a "commitment from the institution to invest in drug and alcohol education."
Although the Trustee's fifth principle is focused on combating "the abuse and unsafe use of alcohol" on campus, the idea behind the current campaign had already formed before the Trustees' announcement, Larimore said.
"The work is definitely consistent with the principles articulated by the Trustees, but this is an effort that was well underway before the announcement of the trustee's principles," Larimore said.
