Influences of Personal, Injunctive, and Descriptive Norms on Early Adolescent Substance use

Abstract

Social norms play an important role in adolescent substance use. Norm focus theory (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990) distinguishes three types of norms: injunctive, descriptive, and personal. This study examines the relative influences of these three norms, as well as the moderating effects of gender and ethnicity, on the concurrent substance use of 2,245 Mexican or Mexican-American students, 676 students of other Latino or multiethnic Latino origin, 756 non-Hispanic White students, and 353 African- American students. Personal norms appear to be the strongest significant predictor of substance use. Descriptive, parental injunctive, and friend injunctive norms also demonstrate significant, though weaker influences. Controlling for intentions reduces the predictive ability of each type of norm, especially personal norms. Gender moderates the relationship between norms and substance use with the relationships generally stronger for males. Personal norms act as stronger predictors of some types of substance use for Mexican/Mexican Americans.

Workplace Substance-Use Norms as Predictors of Employee Substance Use and Impairment: A Survey of U.S. Workers

“…Consistent with these theoretical models, a large literature shows that a strong predictor of heavy drinking among adolescents (i.e., high school and college students) is their perception of the prescriptive drinking norms of their peers (Borsari and Carey, 2001;Neighbors et al, 2007;Perkins, 2002). Social norms also have been found to predict illicit drug use among adolescents (Elek et al, 2006;Neighbors et al, 2008;Verkooijen et al, 2007); the substance use of adolescents is infl uenced by both descriptive (perceptions of how much others drink/use drugs) and injunctive (perceptions of how much others approve of drinking/using drugs) norms (Borsari and Carey, 2003;Elek et al, 2006;Neighbors et al, 2007).…”

The Role of Perceived Peer Norms in the Relationship Between Media Violence Exposure and Adolescents' Aggression

“…No existing scale was available for descriptive and injunctive norms about aggressive behavior. We therefore followed the procedure of studies investigating peer norms related to other behaviors in adolescent samples (e.g., Baumgartner, Valkenburg, & Peter, 2011;Elek, Miller-Day, & Hecht, 2006). Descriptive norms were measured with two items, asking adolescents to indicate how many of their friends showed the following two behaviors in the past six months: (1) swear at another adolescent; (2) kick or hit another adolescent.…”

Willingness to Drink as a Function of Peer Offers and Peer Norms in Early Adolescence

“…Yet, in college students at least, peer infl uence seems to be especially important for males, with drinking a greater part of the male identity (Prentice and Miller, 1993). Studies examining the degree to which gender moderates the strength of peer socialization processes in drinking are confl icting (Andrews et al, 2011;Elek et al, 2006;Kiuru et al, 2010;LaBrie et al, 2008), which may be in part because females are more likely to conform to the behavior of their close friends, whereas males are more likely to conform to the larger peer group (Giletta et al, 2012;Steinberg and Monahan, 2007). This points again to the importance of the peer referent group.…”