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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Social Norms, Social Change I by University of Pennsylvania

4.6
stars
2,000 ratings

About the Course

This is a course on social norms, the rules that glue societies together. It teaches how to diagnose social norms, and how to distinguish them from other social constructs, like customs or conventions. These distinctions are crucial for effective policy interventions aimed to create new, beneficial norms or eliminate harmful ones. The course teaches how to measure social norms and the expectations that support them, and how to decide whether they cause specific behaviors. The course is a joint Penn-UNICEF project, and it includes many examples of norms that sustain behaviors like child marriage, gender violence and sanitation practices. This is Part 1 of the Social Norms, Social Change series. In these lectures, I introduce all the basic concepts and definitions, such as social expectations and conditional preferences, that help us distinguish between different types of social practices like customs, descriptive norms and social norms. Expectations and preferences can be measured, and these lectures explain how to measure them. Measurement is crucial to understanding the nature of the practice you are facing, as well as whether an intervention was or was not successful, and why. In Part 2, we will put into practice all we have learned in Part 1. New! Please use this link for a 30% discount on the recommended book that accompanies this course! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780190622053/?cc=us&lang=en&promocode=AAFLYG6...

Top reviews

EG

Feb 21, 2022

This course opened my mind as to understand what moves people to do and/or think the way they do -and how to measure it- in order to be able to correctly intervene for social change. Simply amazing.

PE

Mar 5, 2019

This course will open your eyes to different behavioural patterns that human engage in, teach how about the suppossed mudane but important things in our society and also how to carry out a research.

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376 - 400 of 506 Reviews for Social Norms, Social Change I

By shenyang

•

Jul 22, 2016

great

By Deleted A

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Jun 12, 2020

Good

By Izhar U M S C o P B U

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May 8, 2020

Good

By Syedhaseeb B

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May 7, 2020

Good

By Naiem T

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Apr 4, 2022

ر

By Peerada N

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Feb 27, 2017

I don't work in social field or anything that has to do with UNICEF, but despite that, I find this course greatly interesting and what I received from it surprisingly exceeded my initial expectations. I find the knowledge from this course useful not only for social workers, but also for community-oriented researchers, or anyone who would like to understand or make a change in a community. Most of this course is an introduction to technical terms, gradually introducing us how to look at certain behaviours of people in any communities, helping us know what such behaviours are made of and how we should start in order to make a change to it. Things I find especially interesting are actually in the last week of the lecture, where the professor had introduced to me tips and tricks for measuring outcomes and making surveys that could actually get quality information - something I never knew how to do and had never expected to know and realise that it would matter so much.

As for the downside, it may be either because I am not familiar with terms in the social and humanity fields or because English is not my mother language, but I find that the professor sometimes uses words too sophisticated, when in reality I thought it would be better if she could have used simpler terms and vocabularies both in the video and the readings - sometimes I find myself becoming confused by her excess uses of fancy words and stretching something that could be briefly explained too much for my liking. Sometimes I even get to finally understand what she meant in the parts where there are examples, which is one of the things I like about the course, too.

Overall, this course was an eye opener for me. I had a very pleasant time learning and am already enrolling for the second course!

By Maria R

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Oct 30, 2022

I found the subject fascinating and also the examples - very interesting to see how we make important change happen in communities, what motivates certain behaviour and how do we go about building desire for a change. However, I had to start writing down the terms as I felt there were new terms brought up as the course progressed, but really often the same terms were re-introduced. I found the structure in this aspect messy/illogical and was only able to follow it better after making my own notes, so I could verify that we're revisiting a concept already introduced. I also felt that if keeping the content more logically ordered, this may have been a shorter course, as there was some repetition.

By Anjali L

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Jul 16, 2017

I really enjoyed the course. It was easy to understand with so many examples and having other students' participation and reading their examples as well. Giving it 4 weeks to complete provided ample of time to complete the course however next time I will try to complete it asap because it always forced me to remember harder of what I learned last week. Plus it would be great if we could download the translated words/text of each week in a complete whole rather doing it one by one (smaller units). I tried downloading it but it did not worked for me. Thank you so much for such a lovely opportunity to learn from you. I look forward to many more to come. :)

By Joshua B

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Apr 23, 2020

A quality course. I wish they spent a bit more time on the transcriptions because some of the lecturers were difficult to understand. I highly recommend keeping a notepad close and plenty of pens at the ready. When you start digging into Collective Practices, Motivations, Personal Normative Beliefs, Social Beliefs, Empirical Expectations, Normative Expectations, Customs, Factual Beliefs, and Pluralistic Ignorance it all really just start to run together. Thanks for this course Professor Bicchieri! I thoroughly enjoyed it and your book, Norms In The Wild!

By Kelli S

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Oct 8, 2017

Excellent ideas with real-world examples. Repetition of concepts was a bit too frequent and made the course significantly longer than it needed to be. The last section in week 4 jumped from 5-8 minute videos to 15-18 minute videos, which felt like it was cramming things together. A slight alteration in pacing would be beneficial. The cyclical structure of idea generation and building is great, just a bit too repetitive. Quizzes mid-video really highlight main points and focus the attention. Overall, a fascinating and deeply educational course.

By Kim

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Sep 1, 2020

The course offers and introduction into thecomplex field of social norms. The prof explains it well and it easy to understand. The perspectives offered by unicef are however unstructured. There is often no explicit comment on what participants should or could learn from there clips. They're also existing clips of a different purpose, so they don't directly address the topics of the course. It would be preferable to edit them or produce new short statements that directly relate to the course

By Hằng N T

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Oct 29, 2021

The course is interesting but incredibly difficult to follow. If you are easily affected by Semantic Satiation (lose meaning of words that are repeated many times) then the course will be more difficult. The readings are also difficult, I found myself read and edit the texts (cut unnecessary parts, sub words with others...) in order to understand them.

Message to the organizers: if you ever organize another course, please look into semantic satiation and try to avoid it.

By Miho W

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Sep 13, 2017

Well designed and informative course. It was very interesting. There are a lot of theories at the beginning, which tires you out a little, but there are also some practical courses towards the end -i wish more time was spent on the practical part to walk us through how to measure social norm. Examples were relevant, although it would be good if there was a way to further engage students in discussions. Overall, very happy with the course, and I definitely learnt a lot!

By Sophie p

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Aug 10, 2019

The topic is very interesting , at least for us who find understanding humans alluring. What I also really liked and found innovative was the colaboration penn university had with ''UNICEF'', which provided videos with specialist discussing what is happening to developing countries related with the lectures of the course .

Easy to comprehend -thus suitable for beginners-, interesting and innovative ,I highly recommend it !

By Teh Y K

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May 14, 2020

A lot of perceptions provided are from non-developed or near-developed countries, which can be a little difficult for those who exist in very developed countries with their own norms. So it can be hard to relate to these situations. However, they are still very well explained and it broadens up my knowledge of how those countries that are in need of better change are trying their best to become better.

By Payal d

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Aug 6, 2020

i thoroughly enjoyed the course. loved the consistency of use of examples, which helped me understand the concepts very well. Also loved Christina's smiling face while she explained the concepts. The only thing i thought was a little inconvenient that at the end of the course the material was a bit rushed given the pace of the previous weeks. Other than that it as an enlightening one month

By Massimo I

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Aug 9, 2017

I found the course very informative and well-structured. However, I would have a appreciated more external resources as well as more case studies, not only in rural areas and villages in the developing world. A reference to the role of social norms and social change in large cities and the role of social media, for example, would have made the course even more relevant.

By Candra P

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Apr 25, 2017

It was great to learn the course with a simple quiz within the video presentation, it helps us to understand the material clearly. Despite the new unfamiliar terms so sometimes I need to open my note back, but Ms. Bicchieri explanation using flow chart really helped me. This is very interesting yet important for my work in the development program, thank you.

By Alexandre D

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Jul 21, 2019

The course was fun! It was a bit challenging but I think it was very well structured, so kudos to you guys. The text should be translated in other relevant languages such as Arabic, French, and Spanish. Additionally, I found a powerpoint by Cristina Bicchieri titled 'What are norms?' on Academia which could have served useful for other class members.

By Tejaswi M

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Oct 17, 2019

Interesting course with valuable theoretical concepts explained. The organization of the content could have been done better, as there seemed to a bit of repetition of some concepts and some concepts not being dealt in depth.

A must-do course for someone interested in Behavior Change Communication. Hoping to learn more in part II of the course.

By Teddra S

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Dec 20, 2020

I learned so much about human behavior. It helped to understand why people do the things they do. Also, how to change some negative social norms. I appreciate the materials, but one problem was the grammar in English. It sort of was a problem for me to infer some of the meanings that I was to understand. But I got through it. Thank you.

By Nabaraj G

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Jul 25, 2019

The Course has excellently delivered the contents which rightly explain the understanding of Social Norms from global perspectives. The lectures and videos are clear and well guide the course contents too. The social change is inevitable and differ from community to community. It would be better to offer next advanced version of the course.

By Cengiz Y

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Jul 17, 2017

Great course.

Nevertheless it should be improved further. Examples are not sufficient to understand the concepts and processes to deal with identifying problems for pluralistic ignorance and how to use vignettes.

thanks for the course, in any case it is very beneficial for the people who are from the outside of the field. Thank you!

By Lærke L G

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Aug 16, 2017

Good content and great that you have the opportunity to learn a lot in very short time (I was able to do the whole course in two days, which is great!). The only critique I have is that several of the questions in the quizzes are formulated quite unclearly, which makes you doubt questions you would probably not doubt otherwise.

By Philip H

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Aug 12, 2018

Fascinating subject matter, presented in a reasonably easy to follow way with good readings, videos and graphics. Some of the ideas were repeated many times and several of pieces of terminology were so similar in name that it could become a little confusing at times, other than that a very educational and enjoyable course.