How Norms-Shifting Interventions Foster Social Norms Change: A Realist Synthesis of Four Community Level Interventions

Between 2017 and 2020, the project provided multi-year research, documentation, and technical support to four norms-shifting interventions (NSI) in three country contexts. These interventions, which included Transforming Masculinities, Husbands Schools, Girls Holistic Development, and Growing Up Great!, worked to improve AYSRH by building awareness, capacities, and agency among adolescents and adults, creating better linkages to reproductive health services, and fostering an enabling socio-normative environment. The NSI employed similar norms change mechanisms, including direct and amplifying mechanisms. Direct mechanisms, such as dialogical activities and role modeling, aimed to foster social comparison and learning, while amplifying mechanisms, such as community-services linkages, allowed for the achievement of intentions to use services. Project and community-level change agents, including project staff, community volunteers, and reference groups, played a crucial role in facilitating supportive processes of social change. Reference groups, which influence young people's attitudes and AYSRH actions, were often peers and family members. The NSI reached these reference groups directly or indirectly via diffusion, allowing them to assimilate new ideas and attitudes and play opinion-setting and legitimization roles for norms-shifting. The findings of the Passages Project led to a middle-range theory explaining how project activities and their change mechanisms, including change agents, foster shifts in community reasoning that grow over time via diffusion effects and information feedback loops, leading to behavioral and normative changes. The project's Realist Synthesis analysis and working paper provided greater clarity on what to consider in designing norms-shifting interventions. The synthesis focused on norms change mechanisms, which were defined as having two interlinked parts: the NSI activities, including the social change agents that implement activities, and the subsequent changes in the reasoning of the receiving community. The findings of the project helped to clarify to programmers how NSI aims and subsequent conceptualization of mechanisms and change agents can improve the enabling normative environment for health. The Passages Project employed a Realist Evaluation approach, which uses program theories of change to understand and test how project activities lead to a series of intermediate changes that eventually lead to project outcomes. The project conducted a Realist Synthesis of the four interventions, which developed program theories of change showing pathways to normative and individual change. The theories were confirmed by outcome evaluation studies assessing individual and community-level shifts in norms, and showed the NSI achieved individual and normative outcomes predicted in their theories with some variations. The project's working paper shares seven design recommendations that cover NSI aims, strategies, and change agents, and considerations for implementing NSI within complex social systems. These recommendations aim to improve the enabling normative environment for health and support behavior change. The Passages Project's findings and recommendations provide valuable insights for programmers and practitioners working on AYSRH and social and behavior change interventions.