Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

[Alan Berkowitz <>]

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you have already gone to the RAINN website to see the posters 
for RAINN's national sexual assault prevention social norms media 
campaign for men, for which I was a consultant, and we have received a 
number of positive comments about the campaign.

(The posters can be accessed at :  www.rainn.org/gcposters.html )

Following the campaign announcement I received a very thoughtful query 
about the posters from Susan Marine, the Director of Sexual Assault 
Prevention and Response at Harvard University.  In the interest of 
fostering dialogue, Susan and I, along with Kelley Bevis from RAINN, 
would like to share her query along with my response.

We hope that others who have questions or comments about the RAINN 
campaign will also consider using this list so that we can all benefit 
from each others' thoughts and ideas. RAINN's campaign is the first 
national social norms sexual assault prevention media campaign and is 
therefore exploratory.  Your comments and reactions will be extremely 
helpful to us as we consider similar initiatives for the future.


Hello Kelley (and Alan),

Thanks for sending the link to the posters. I have a bit of feedback 
about them that I hope is helpful and not unwelcome.

The posters are excellent in the strong message they carry. I am a 
believer in the power of the social norms approach, and am familiar with 
several different social norms campaigns and the research about them. 
That being said, I am concerned about the vague reference to the 
citations-- "based on 1833 men at 6 schools" and "based on 2809 men at 7 
schools". I wonder if it would be possible to say something a little 
more official-sounding, i.e. based on a national research study with XYZ 
official name, and possibly a link to the results of the study. If we 
show it to our students, they will wonder which six/seven schools, and 
why they should be interested in the opinions of these 1833 men. They 
are by nature curious, data-skeptical people. I think there are 
compelling reasons for that, but the statistic doesn't help to make that 
clear. I think it might even be preferable to say  something about the 
scope of the study in the text.

My understanding of social norms is that students need to think it has 
pertinence/relevance to them, on their campus, in order to be effective. 
My concern is that this reference is too vague for them to think it 
could apply/refer to them and thus, it would be easy to dismiss or be 
skeptical about.

Alan, I know you're always more than willing to engage with questions 
about social norms methodology and practice. Please feel free to comment 
on the approach here and help me to understand if this approach has 
actually been shown to be effective even though it is vague-- I could be 
missing something!

thanks in advance for your consideration of these concerns,

Susan

Susan Marine
Director
Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response
Harvard University
340 Holyoke Center
1350 Mass. avenue
Cambridge MA 02138
617 384-9081

Dear Susan,

Thank you for your thoughtful comments about the posters.  I agree with 
your comments.  In retrospect I think that we should have put an 
asterisk next to the comment about the data to refer the reader to the 
bottom of the poster where there is a reference to go to the RAINN 
website for more information about the survey data.  I encourage you to 
look at the RAINN site sometime next week after the detailed description 
of the data is posted to let us know what you think of what we said 
about the development of this project and the data used.

For this campaign we were operating under a number of constraints that 
created a less than ideal situation.  In each case we made decisions to 
go forward knowing that what we were choosing was not what we would like 
ideally, but that it was good enough to justify continuing. One day I 
hope that there will be a national data base that is more compelling 
than aggregate data from eight schools, but for now I felt that it was 
adequate enough to justify the posters.

I also have many questions about the validity of a national social norms 
campaign and view this one as a test case. If may be, for example, that 
national data is not relevant or salient for students on many campuses. 
This could especially be true for Harvard, as your students may not see 
themselves as comparable to students on other campuses.

Having gone into this process with many questions I am glad to have the 
good thinking and feedback of you and others to help us all brainstorm 
together what is possible and what might be better in the future. Thank 
you very much for your thoughts.

best

Alan


If you would like to order any posters or direct any questions to RAINN, 
contact Kelley Bevis at:  

Sincerely,


Alan Berkowitz

--
Alan D. Berkowitz,  PhD
P.O. Box 701
Trumansburg, N.Y. 14886-0701
Tel:   607 387-3789
Fax:  607 387-9615
www.alanberkowitz.com