Shifting Social Norms as Part of Social and Behavior Change: Training Curriculum

"An increased focus on social norms can help improve development impact..."

The field of social behaviour change (SBC) has long recognised that norms play a significant role across sectors. What an individual believes others do and what others expect of them can strongly influence how individuals act. From the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Passages Project, this 5-module curriculum explores social norms concepts, programme approaches, and the benefits and challenges of engaging in normative change efforts.

The Social Norms Training Curriculum covers five 4-hour participatory sessions ("modules"), led by at least one gender or social norms/behaviour change specialist. Through small group discussions, relevant case studies, and opportunities for reflection, the training aims to help participants share and learn from their own experiences. Workshop participants are invited to consider what their projects are doing and can do to address normative shifts, what they can hope to accomplish within project timeframes, and the types of partnerships needed to facilitate this work.

Specifically, the curriculum begins with facilitator materials for download in Word format, including:

• Facilitator Guide
• Annex A: Sample agenda from Module 1
• Annex B1: "Holistic" training plan, to be used by facilitators planning on delivering all five modules sequentially
• Annex B2: "Modular" training plan, to be used by facilitators planning to delivery modules separately or to mix and match modules
• Annex C: Curriculum bibliographical materials by module

Each of the five modules includes: slide sets to use during in-person as well as virtual delivery; speaker instructions and content, also for in-person and virtual delivery; exercises based on real case studies; participant handouts; and a list of reference materials and tools. The modules include:

1. Why Social Norms Matter - A Conceptual Foundation for Norms-Shifting Interventions: This module sets the conceptual foundation for social norms, discusses how norms influence attitudes and behaviours, and examines how norms are held in place by reference groups. Looking toward norms-shifting interventions (NSIs), this section offers an overview of theories on how norms influence behaviour change. It also reviews the importance of articulating intermediate normative change effects to guide design, monitoring, and evaluation of NSIs.
2. Assessing Social Norms to Inform Program Design and Implementation Strategies: This module offers a deeper dive into the concepts of social norms and provides opportunities to put these concepts into practice. It starts with a review of the value of conducting norms assessments (to understand, identify, and explore norms) and then reviews approaches and resources to assess norms for programmes. It concludes with examples and participatory exercises to practice conducting norms assessments and rapid analysis to maximise the use of findings in programme design, monitoring, and evaluations.
3. Designing Norms-Shifting Interventions: This module focuses on designing NSIs. It takes the key concepts and learning from formative research to focus on norms programme design, including approaches and issues to consider when designing NSIs, strategies that NSIs have used to shift norms, and reflections on the importance of ethical grounding to norms programme design and implementation.
4. Measuring Normative Shifts in Complex Environments: This module provides an overview of monitoring and evaluation. The monitoring section includes strategies to improve NSI implementation, and also discusses project monitoring and rapid studies, which provide a basis for learning and adaptive management of NSIs during implementation. The rest of the module presents the evaluation of normative shifts and examines quantitative and qualitative approaches to measure normative change resulting from NSI project implementation.
5. Scale-Up of Norms-Shifting Interventions: This module provides an overview of key concepts of planned scale-up using the ExpandNet framework as a guide, including defining the NSI and its implementation supports and covering additional elements to consider when planning scale-up. It then reviews some technical, capacity, and ethical considerations for scaling up NSIs.