Personal Social Norms Research Articles

34 Normative beliefs about tobacco products differ by age: Implications for smoking cessation and harm reduction

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The prevalence of combusted cigarette (CC) smoking among older adults is stagnant, with zero declines attributable to e-cigarette (EC) use. Normative beliefs predict quitting and switching to ECs (a behavior likely to yield health benefits for those unable to quit), so this study seeks to characterize the role of age in norms about CC and EC use. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Data come from Wave 5 (2018-2019) of the adult Population Assessment of Tobacco Use and Health (PATH) study, a nationally-representative, U.S. longitudinal cohort. Analyses were restricted to people with established CC use (smoked CCs in the past year, currently smoke regularly, and smoked ≥100 lifetime CCs; n=8,590). Cross-sectional weighted estimates of the prevalence of normative beliefs about CCs and ECs were calculated by age using the Balanced Repeated Replication (BRR) method with Fay=0.3. We used chi-square tests to examine the association of age group (18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, or ≥65) with the prevalence of 2 descriptive and 4 personal social norms. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The prevalence of the normative belief that most people disapprove of CCs (p DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Older adults are more likely than younger adults to endorse anti-tobacco norms, which prior work shows is associated with quitting smoking. These beliefs could be leveraged to create targeted communications towards older adults encouraging smoking cessation. More research is needed to assess age-related tobacco beliefs and switching from CC to EC.

Sexual Violence Prevention Among Intercollegiate Athletes, Recreational Athletes, and Non-Athletes: Environmental Considerations for Program Interventions

Previous research has suggested that individual, social, and environmental factors all play a role in developing individual attitudes regarding sexual violence. On college campuses, both intercollegiate and recreational athletics provide opportunities for students to engage in group settings that can impact these attitudes. The primary purpose of this study was to examine how attitudes towards sexual violence compared across intercollegiate athlete, recreational athlete, and non-athlete populations, while accounting for other individual and school factors. Analysis of a large national dataset found very small but statistically significant differences among these groups in their personal social norms, campus social norms, and bystander efficacy regarding sexual violence. Intercollegiate athletes were slightly lower than non-athletes in their personal social norms and bystander efficacy and slightly higher in their perceived campus social norms, while recreational athletes were higher in bystander efficacy, but lower in personal and campus social norms. Other personal demographic factors, including gender identity and sexual orientation, were also significant, while most campus factors were non-significant. These findings suggest the identification of college sport as an at-risk community for sexual violence may be an oversimplification, with implications for program intervention design.

“Smoking Is Sóóó ... Sandals and White Socks”: Co-Creation of a Dutch Anti-Smoking Campaign to Change Social Norms

This article considers co-creation as a new persuasive strategy in health campaigns. Co-creation enables target audience members to become active campaign producers. A recent Dutch anti-smoking campaign applied co-creation, inviting the target audience to complete the slogan “smoking is sóóó . . . ” with something outdated on social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook and Twitter to stress non-smoking as the new social norm. From a corpus-linguistic perspective, we investigated how the slogans from the target audience resonated with or deviated from the campaign’s original message. In general, the target audience slogans followed the campaign’s approach, but on the SNSs, differences were found regarding the valence, type of utterance, and domain to which smoking was compared. The target audience frequently compared smoking with other (inter)personal social norms. Co-creation thus provides the target audience with an opportunity to disseminate campaign messages from their own perspective, but at the same time a co-creation strategy risks diluting the intended campaign message.