Reporting that social norms campaigns fail to reduce alcohol abuse on college campuses, Henry Wechsler and a team of researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health released the results of their controversial study earlier this month.
A popular approach to alcohol control and education, social norms programs aim to change students' perceptions of drinking and drunkenness through flyers and advertisements urging moderation.
A well known example at Penn -- carefully labeled as "not an endorsement of body art" -- features the phrase "four or fewer," the number of drinks most University students imbibe in the course of an evening, memorably tattooed on a muscular bicep.
Wechsler, whose research sample included 118 colleges, said that his data "didn't show one ounce of improvement on any of the 37 campuses that use social norms marketing campaigns."
The Harvard researchers surveyed both students and administrators to determine where programs were in place and how much exposure the student body had had to the marketing.
"We looked at those [schools] where most students said they had received information about the actual drinking on campus," Wechsler said, "and those schools didn't show improvement."
Social norms experts and college administrators, meanwhile, dispute Wechsler's results and question his methods.
Wesley Perkins, a sociology professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York and the acknowledged "father of social norms" released a statement accusing Wechsler of providing "a biased and limited review of the research literature" and of ignoring data that proves the effectiveness of social norms programs, most notably at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
The National Social Norms Resource Center joined in questioning Wechsler's conclusions, claiming that "no other survey data was collected about the... quality of these reported programs, and... that they made no additional efforts, such as campus visits, 'to determine the content, scope and duration' of them.'"
The center cited data from the Hobart and William Smith Colleges' Social Norms Project, which reportedly achieved a 30 percent reduction in high-risk drinking over 5 years, as well as success stories from the University of Arizona, Rowan University and Northern Illinois University.
Wechsler said that who his critics are reflects their interests -- not the validity of the study.
"One of my major critics is the industry," Wechsler said, adding that beer companies often finance social norms programs.
"If you think that the beer industry is going to finance programs that are effective in cutting down the sales of beer... I've got a bridge to sell you."
Stephanie Ives, Penn's Alcohol Coordinator, said that social norms advertisements were just one element of the University's strategy to curb excessive drinking.
Listing the components of "successful alcohol risk-reduction campaigns," Ives noted that Penn uses educational programming, clear policies, attractive non-alcoholic social options, consistent enforcement, and readily available counseling services as well as social norms advertising.
