Assessing social norms to inform programme design and implementation strategies

It is a critical moment to make the latest knowledge and evidence on social norms widely accessible and provide opportunities for practitioners and researchers from different disciplines and sectors to...

It is a critical moment to make the latest knowledge and evidence on social norms widely accessible and provide opportunities for practitioners and researchers from different disciplines and sectors to share and produce knowledge.

This workshop built on the SA-SNLC’s promise to improve practice towards the use of social norms. Our facilitators guided participants through the assessment of social norms to inform programme design and implementation strategies through two sessions spread out over two days.

The takeaways from the workshop were:

• Existing formative assessment approaches may overlook norms. If shifting norms is important to your program, completing a norms assessment is a must.

• It’s important to understand how norms influence program behaviours.

• Norms assessments answer, for a given context: what the relevant norms are, who the reference groups are, why people comply with norms, and which norms are the most important.