Earlier this month, posters appeared in Naperville area high schools with a message: “Reality … 75 percent of your peers don’t smoke.”
Though the message may seem simple, the posters reflect nearly two years of work by local educators in Districts 203 and 204 and the expertise of the community outreach group NCO Youth and Family Services. More importantly, the designers believe, the posters represent a new approach to substance abuse prevention, by communicating to 12,000 local teens that they are in the majority if they make healthy choices.
“The idea is to educate high school students so they understand that most of their peers don’t smoke,” said Sandy Stelmach, a District 203 counselor.
The project began in 2000, when Stelmach and Bobbi Laffin, a District 204 counselor, learned about social marketing and normative education. The concept of social norms was developed by Michael Haines at Northern Illinois University to combat binge drinking.
According to the Web site of the Social Norms Resource Center, founded by Haines in July 2000, social norms are the perceived standards of acceptable attitudes and behavior prevalent among members of a community. Haines later tried the same approach at high schools in the DeKalb County area and was able to document changes in behavior.
“We modeled the 203/204 program after the DeKalb study,” Stelmach said.
The Naperville districts teamed up with Karen Jarczyk at NCO Youth and Family Services in Naperville to plan the campaign. Financial support came from the Illinois Department of Human Services. A survey of 500 local teens was conducted last spring with the help of researchers from the University of Illinois.
The idea was to determine the teens’ use of substances such as tobacco and alcohol and their perception about peer usage.
“When we got the report last fall, one fact really jumped out at us:” teens thought that just 9 percent of their peers had never smoked, Stelmach said. But research showed 75 percent of those surveyed had never smoked.
Project organizers decided to use that fact as the basis for their first attempt at marketing the reality of teen habits. Tobacco is considered by prevention specialists as a “gateway” drug, meaning its use can be paired with other substances or lead to more serious problems.
The next step involved holding focus groups with area teens to get their views on the poster design and wording. In early March, the completed posters debuted in Naperville Central, Naperville North, Neuqua Valley and Waubonsie Valley High Schools. So far, Stelmach and Laffin have been pleased that the posters are staying on the walls, their first measure of success.
“At least one counselor told me that he saw kids noticing [the poster] and smiling,” Stelmach said. “He said that he thinks it will be empowering to kids who don’t smoke.”
Laffin said the Waubonsie Valley faculty supports the approach. “They liked the focus on the positive health choices that so many kids are making,” she said.
A second poster using the same fact will appear in April. Next year, another survey will be used to determine changes in attitude and/or behavior.
The goal is to reduce teen smoking in the districts by 5 percent and inform the students who do smoke, Stelmach said.
A future poster campaign may communicate the reality of alcohol use.
“People talk about drinking parties involving several hundred kids,” Stelmach said. “But several thousand kids are not [involved]. You have to look at the reality and change the perception.”
