Social Norms / Gender Norms

Facilitating Social Norm Change for Health and Development

C-Change is looking at the role of social norms as powerful factors influencing family planning and HIV prevention behaviors and learning how to design behavior change communications that focus on social norms. A norm is what most people do. A social norm is a standard or pattern for human behavior or action. Two features of social norms make them powerful influences on behavior. First, they are shared among members of a social group. Second, some form of sanction will occur if the pattern or standard is not followed. Understanding how social norms change is critical to understanding social change.

Male Gender Norms Meeting

C-Change and the Interagency Gender Working Group (IGWG) coordinated a meeting on male involvement and male gender norms with respect to family planning on March 16 & 17, 2009 at AED headquarters in Washington DC. Sponsored by USAID, the 1-1/2 day meeting brought together 33 experts in the field of male gender norms.

Attendees explored the critical elements in programs that successfully integrate male gender norms to improve reproductive health outcomes. They also explored the logic of how change happens both at the individual and societal levels and the critical paths between shifting gender norms and the resulting family planning behaviors. An initial outcome of the meeting was recognition among the participants that the work done in the HIV and AIDS arena around gender transformative interventions has important lessons for family planning programs. Gender transformative interventions are defined by WHO as approaches that seek to transform gender roles and promote more gender equitable relationships between men and women.

A result from the meeting is a program guidance brief titled "Incorporating Male Gender Norms into Family Planning and Reproductive Health Programs," which details eight recommendations to guide family planning programmers in the design, implementation, and evaluation of family planning programs that have a male gender norms component. See the Resources section of this website.

Facilitating Change

Social norms change as societies and communities face different health and social challenges. C-Change is studying social norm change to identify communication approaches that will facilitate change in the interest of improved health and development. A number of models explain how this change in social norms occurs, and communication plays a critical role. In some situations, the perceptions people hold about what others are doing do not match what others are actually doing. Perceived norms lag behind the actual norms. Facilitating communication about what others are actually doing facilitates social change.

In Lesotho, sex that involves multiple concurrent partners is a major driver of the HIV epidemic. C-Change seeks to understand what role social norms play in supporting this behavior and how communication can be used in support of a behavior change for HIV prevention.

In Tanzania, we are exploring intervention research on gender norms, which are the social expectations about how men and women should behave due to the fact that they are men and women. C-Change will work with the Tanzanian Marketing and Communications (T-MARC) company to test the added value of a radio communication intervention addressing gender norms in the context of family planning, specifically, the community based distribution of oral contraceptives. In India, we are testing SCALE® - a systems approach that brings together interested parties to resolve a problem -- to mobilize communities and many types of organizations around the issue of early childbearing, and will be using change in social norms as one indicator of success.

 In Madagascar, C-Change is examining how a simple dialogue card can facilitate horizontal (wife-to-husband; woman-to-woman) communication about family planning. We want to determine if this card helps couples find out that others are practicing family planning thus facilitating social norm change.