Citation

Cislaghi B, Heise L. Health Promot. Int. 2019; 34(3): 616-623.

Affiliation

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/heapro/day017

PMID

29579194

Abstract

Social norms can greatly influence people's health-related choices and behaviours. In the last few years, scholars and practitioners working in low- and mid-income countries (LMIC) have increasingly been trying to harness the influence of social norms to improve people's health globally. However, the literature informing social norm interventions in LMIC lacks a framework to understand how norms interact with other factors that sustain harmful practices and behaviours. This gap has led to short-sighted interventions that target social norms exclusively without a wider awareness of how other institutional, material, individual and social factors affect the harmful practice. Emphasizing norms to the exclusion of other factors might ultimately discredit norms-based strategies, not because they are flawed but because they alone are not sufficient to shift behaviour. In this paper, we share a framework (already adopted by some practitioners) that locates norm-based strategies within the wider array of factors that must be considered when designing prevention programmes in LMIC.

Language: en