Why Do People Do What They Do? A Social Norms Manual for Zimbabwe and Swaziland

This training manual offers a detailed explanation of what social norms are and how they influence behaviour - with a particular emphasis on behaviour related to violence against children. The manual forms part of a series of products from The Multi Country Study on the Drivers of Violence Affecting Children - a four-country study in Italy, Peru, Zimbabwe, and Vietnam being conducted by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Office of Research – Innocenti.

The project involves country-based research (such as literature reviews, secondary data analyses, and interventions mapping) by researchers and stakeholders that seeks to unpack the various determinants of violence in order to identify areas for further exploration, as well as existing gaps in the evidence base. The evidence gathered will generally provide a more detailed picture on what is known about violence affecting children in each country. As part of this process, this manual was developed to train researchers in Zimbabwe and Swaziland to be able to identify and study social norms, and how they influence violence against children.

The manual contains the following sections which all include practical exercises to help explain the different concepts:

Section 1: Basic Concepts - explains concepts such as beliefs, customs, moral norms, descriptive norms, and social norms.

Section 2: Social Categories - looks at how people use social categories, how schemas work (a socially shared belief that applies to some object or situation on the basis of that thing belonging to a category), and how schemas can be changed.

Section 3: Social Networks - explains how social networks work and how to uncover networks using the Full Network Approach, Snowball Approach, and Egocentric Approach.

Section 4: Social Change - looks at what works in bringing about social change by focusing on social norms.

Section 5: Measurement - looks at the importance of measurement and how to measure behaviour, empirical expectations, personal normative beliefs, and normative expectations, as well as potential problems with measurement.