Giorgia Gon (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)

“Changing hygiene social norms at key times in the life-course: what works and how?”

Abstract. Social norms are shared behavioral rules that prescribe actions that are followed because of reciprocal expectations and, in some cases, social enforecemnt. Crucially, once established, social norms can generate durable changes in hygiene practices. Despite this potential and the use of norm interventions in public health, our knowledge concerning what works to change hygiene norms and why they change remains limited. The HY-NORM project (“Changing HYgiene social NORMs at key times in the life-course”) leverages a unique opportunity to measure multiple aspects of social norms within three distinct randomized cluster trials targeting hygiene behaviours in high-burden countries: Cambodia, Uganda and Bangladesh. These three trials used norm-targeting behavior change techniques. The presentation will explore the preliminary findings from a randomized cluster trial designed to change food hygiene behavior for complementary feeding in the home across 92 villages in Bangladesh. The main research question is: what factors (e.g. intervention, network relationships, tightness and looseness, demographics) explain variation in food hygiene social norms at the individual and cluster levels, in this context?