One year after the launch of a "social norms" campaign to change students' perceptions about alcohol use on campus, Alcohol and Other Drug Education Coordinator Margaret Smith and others are already seeing the impact of their statistic-laden posters.
According to Smith, the campaign began in the fall of 1999 to provide students with factual information on which to base their drinking decisions.
While in the past the health education field has relied on threatening messages and scary statistics to frighten students into abstaining from alcohol, the social norms campaign takes the opposite approach, Smith said.
"Let's tell students what they're doing right," Smith said. "Let's give people information and they can make the choice."
Thus, Smith and others in the department have utilized statistics collected by the College's Evaluation and Research Office to highlight the high number of students on campus who do not engage in heavy drinking.
"On a Saturday night, 80 percent of Dartmouth students drink four or fewer drinks" one poster proclaims.
According to John Pryor, such a figure came from a 40-question "Perceptions of Alcohol at Dartmouth" survey conducted last spring via the Internet.
Taking a random selection of enrolled, on-campus students representative of the student body in terms of gender and class year, 1200 students were blitzed and requested to take the survey.
Several follow-up messages to the students yielded a 60 percent response rate, which Pryor considers "very good."
Similar surveys have been carried out by the College since the early 1990s and are conducted independent of the social norms campaign, Pryor said.
And according to Pryor, the impacts of the social norms campaign were visible in last spring's survey, which showed a change in students' perceptions of campus alcohol use, as well as a decrease in some levels of binge drinking.
For example, when asked, "Which of the following best represents your own attitude about alcohol?" the majority of students hold a fairly moderate view, seeing it as wrong for alcohol to interfere with academics.
However, students also respond that the prevalent campus attitude is much more permissive towards drinking.
While this misperception has existed for years, last spring the gap between students' individual alcohol views and their perceptions of the views of others narrowed for the first time, Pryor said.
And as students' perception of accepted alcohol use changes, research shows that negative behaviors can be changed as well, Pryor said.
Indeed, a reduction in alcohol consumption in the highest category was seen last year, Pryor noted.
And while such changes cannot be directly correlated to the social norms campaign began in the fall of 1999, Pryor believes it is the positive influence of the campaign already showing its face.
Smith too has already seen the positive impact of the campaign in her work.
"There is a minority that over-drinks, but I'd like us to also focus on the students who drink responsibly," Smith said.
However, not all students easily accept the messages of the social norms campaign.
According to Evangeline Choe '01, an intern in the office of Alcohol and Other Drug Education and Outreach who has worked with Smith on the campaign, she receives a wide range of student responses.
In pasting up posters across campus and speaking to UGA groups, Choe has seen a significant number of students who question the validity of the statistics used.
Yet others respond very positively and begin to question their previously held perceptions of alcohol use.