Sponsor: Montana Department of Transportation

Three main conclusions were drawn from the beverage consumption survey data. First, the way in which parents socialize their children in the home with regard to beverage consumption is a strong influence on student beverage consumption behavior. Second, the availability of beverages in the school environment is critical in influencing
students’ intention to drink unhealthy beverages. Third, on average, students in this study reported healthy drinking behaviors.

Sponsor: Montana Office of Public Instruction, Health Enhancement and Safety Division

Sponsor: Montana Office of Public Instruction

Most people believe that unhealthy attitudes and behaviors are the norm among their peers. In fact, just the opposite is true. MOST of Us has administered surveys to tens of thousands of students across Montana and around the country; the results of each and every one have shown that students greatly exaggerate the prevalence of unhealthy attitudes and behaviors among their peers. For example, while 70% of Montana teens report being tobacco free, the perception among teens is that 70% of their peers use tobacco. And when students think that “everybody’s doing it” – whether the “it” is smoking, drinking, or engaging in other risky behaviors – they are more likely to engage in these behaviors themselves.

Important changes can be achieved by teaching middle and high school students that not everyone is doing it, and that the majority of their peers are making healthy choices. This knowledge empowers students to continue and improve upon their healthy lifestyles.

The YWS consists of two integrated parts: an online survey that gathers information about a variety of issues (including alcohol, tobacco, drugs, violence and safety) and a school-specific social norms marketing campaign that educates students about the results of the survey. The YWS program increases the accuracy of students’ perceptions about the behaviors of their peers, which leads to an increase in their own healthy attitudes and behavior.

The YWS online survey only takes approximately ten minutes to complete. Administrators receive school-specific data reflecting their students’ perceptions and actual behaviors concerning alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and other issues within two weeks of survey administration. Schools may also customize the surveys, removing and adding questions to get at the issues of greatest importance to them. The YWS survey is not designed to replace the Youth Risk Behavior Survey or the Prevention Needs Assessment — it is designed to provide schools more comprehensive data about what is happening among their students, as well as analyze how students’ perceptions and behaviors change over the years.

Why Would Schools be Interested in the YWS?

Schools have requested a user-friendly survey that can provide them with:

• The opportunity to capture critical data about the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of students
• Flexibility to tailor the survey to meet the school’s needs
• The ability to survey the whole student population to avoid sample bias
• Efficiency of a survey that takes approximately 20 minutes for students to answer
• The opportunity to administer parallel surveys to parents and teachers to measure their perceptions about the students

Options for What To Do with the YWS Data

The YWS data can be used:

1. To provide schools with up to date information on their students’ attitudes, behaviors and opinions
2. As an evaluation tool to assess prevention programs
3. To create and evaluate a social norms campaign.

Sponsor: Various private and public funders

Links

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

For this project, MOST of Us is pioneering the use of the social norms approach to build public and legislative support for impaired driving prevention strategies. This model of “social norms advocacy” will be tested in high-risk impaired driving states, beginning with Montana.

The project began with the administration of three surveys about impaired driving and impaired driving enforcement: an online survey of Montana law enforcement officers, a phone survey of Montana adults, and a national phone survey of adult residents of all 50 states. The results of these surveys will be used to influence public conversation about impaired driving issues.

Sponsor: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

Links

• Montana Department of Transportation
• Montana Highway Patrol

To reduce the number of crashes involving commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) and passenger vehicles, particularly those caused by young passenger vehicle drivers, MOST of Us will implement strategies to train drivers ages 20 and younger to operate passenger vehicles safely around CMVs.

The project will begin with formative research on the causes of CMV crashes involving young drivers. MOST of Us will then develop recommendations for tactics and strategies to train and educate young drivers on the dangers and necessities of sharing the road with CMVs. This project will include educational components for the web and television.

Sponsor: Montana Department of Transportation

Links

• Montana Department of Transportation
• Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies – Montana Coalition
• National SAFE KIDS Campaign

MOST of Us delivered strategic technical assistance to the 16 Safe Kids / Safe Communities (SKSC) Coalitions across Montana on occupant protection promotion projects. MOST of Us provided the coalitions with media messages, marketing strategies, prevention activities and evaluation tools to help them pursue and evaluate prevention efforts in their communities.

Sponsor: Montana Department of Transportation

In addition, MOST of Us provided technical assistance and training to communities around Montana to help them work more effectively with their local law enforcement groups with regard to occupant protection promotion.

Sponsor: Montana Department of Transportation

Links

• Montana Department of Transportation
• Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Montana Safe Kids, Safe Communities
• National SAFE KIDS Campaign

The MOST of Us Wear Seatbelts Campaign was the first statewide campaign use of the social norms approach to increase seatbelt use. Designed to increase the number of 18- to 80-year-old Montanans who wear their seatbelts, the campaign generated statistically significant results after only one year with regard to several measures of the target population’s behaviors and perceptions.

The results of the initial Montana Adult Safety Belt Norms Survey showed that the majority of Montanans wear safety belts when driving or riding in a motor vehicle. Further, they revealed that misperceptions about this norm were pervasive. Most survey respondents misperceived the majority norm by underestimating the number of Montana adults who wear safety belts. Sample results include:

• 84.9% of the respondents reported that they wore safety belts the last time they drove a vehicle. However, they estimated that 54.0% (the mean estimate) of typical Montana adults wore safety belts the last time they drove.

• 85.3% of the respondents reported wearing a safety belt the last time they rode in a vehicle as a passenger. However, their perception was that only 43.5% of typical Montana adults wore a safety belt the last time they were a passenger in a motor vehicle.

• 86.6% of the respondents said that they made sure all of their passengers wore safety belts the last time they were driving a vehicle and carrying passengers. However, when asked to estimate the percentage of typical Montana adults who made sure that all of their passengers wore safety belts the last time they carried passengers, the mean estimate was 28.5%.

• While 96.1% of the respondents who had carried children four-years-old or younger said the child or children were in a child restraint safety the last time they drove with such a child, respondents estimated the percentage of typical Montana adults who made sure a four-year-old or younger child was in a child restraint was 67.6%.

After just one year of intensive social norms media, Montanans’ perceptions of the frequency of safety belt use increased significantly across all measures. As perceptions of safety belt use increased, so did reported safety belt use. In fact, increases in safety belt use were seen across a variety of measures, including the frequency with which respondents reported: 1) wearing a safety belt at least 90 percent of the time; 2) always wearing a safety belt as a passenger; and 3) always making passengers wear safety belts when driving. Increased accuracy of perceptions of safety belt use correlated with increases in self-reported safety belt use, clearly indicating that safety belt use is a viable topic for a social norms marketing campaign.

Improvements in reported safety belt usage also correlated with awareness of the social norms message. Those respondents who recalled the social norms message had the highest reported safety belt usage. In contrast, there was virtually no difference in safety belt use frequency between those who recalled non-social norms messages and those who recalled no safety belt media at all.

After this first successful campaign year, funding changes caused the levels of social norms safety belt media to plummet, while levels of non-normative safety belt media continued to increase. The result was that while awareness of general safety belt media continued to grow, awareness of social norms media dropped. As social norms media awareness dropped off, so too did the gains in reported safety belt usage that were seen after the campaign’s first year.

These self-reported data suggest that the positive changes seen over the first year of the campaign may be attributable to the social norm messages. In their absence, increases in reported safety belt usage ceased to be seen, even in the face of dramatically increasing levels of traditional safety belt media.

However, since one year of self-reported data is not enough to draw conclusions from, it will be the job of future researchers to evaluate and compare the efficacy of normative and non-normative messages. Nonetheless, these preliminary findings are an encouraging and compelling sign that the social norms approach has a strong applicability to occupant protection issues.

Sponsor: Montana Department of Transportation

The goal of Montana Rules – besides helping students pass their tests – is to give students a mastery of the rules and regulations that keep Montana’s road’s safe, a knowledge which we believe will encourage them to be safer drivers once they get behind the wheel.

12,000 copies of the Montana Rules CD-ROM were distributed at no charge to all of Montana’s 390 junior high and high schools, and MOST of Us repeatedly receives requests for more. The game has already become an important curriculum item for Driver’s Ed teachers from around the state. Because of the strong response to Montana Rules, MOST of Us has designed and programmed educational traffic safety games for elementary school students.

The Montana Rules format could easily be expanded to cover other topics; MOST of Us is considering making a version that is dedicated specifically to occupant protection, teaching kids to buckle up and correcting their misperceptions about safety belt use.

Play Online

‘Montana Rules’ Online Game – Windows / Mac / Linux / Wii

Download

‘Montana Rules’ for Windows 98 / XP / Vista / 7 – 54.1mb (x86 32-bit Application)

‘Montana Rules’ for Mac OS X 10.x – 76.0mb (Intel/PPC Universal Binary)

Sponsor: Montana Department of Transportation