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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

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.

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.

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476 - 500 of 506 Reviews for Social Norms, Social Change I

By Nawafil Y

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Oct 24, 2023

sxZSx

By Idoko D S

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Oct 18, 2020

Good

By Shameen B

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Oct 10, 2023

...

By Simon C

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Nov 4, 2020

The material is very interesting, if somewhat hypothetical. I enjoyed it - thank you.

I would have appreciated more real life examples (in number as well as in nature) to help me understand the concepts.

The lecturer and the contributors all have strong accents which made following them difficult. The transcripts quite often didn't help as they also failed to catch what was being said and also failed to correct mistakes in the English and the grammar & punctuation were not always correct. All in all, it was difficult for me as a native English speaker to understand at times, so must be very difficult for non-native English speakers. I suppose could create a survey to discover what other students thought and see if they were following a social norm or not...

By Ana a

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Mar 1, 2023

Too much time spent on definitions (with considerable repetition of information) - that is hardly the most interesting topics you can share. Would be much more interesting to understanding the science behind behavior as well as the best practices around measuring and influencing social practices (what has worked and not worked, what you have learnt, etc.)

By Koko W

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Dec 30, 2020

The course was very useful and interesting. However, week four could have been divided into two or more weeks--the material became significantly more technical and lengthy, which was like a "speedbump" to to my learning and progress. Distributing the materials more evening and assigning more application homeworks would be useful.

By Catherine H

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Dec 22, 2018

This is material that you're not going to use directly, but can use indirectly in your work later on. It's pretty dry material, but I honestly learned a lot of valuable information. I would recommend it if you're willing to put in the work. If not, you wont learn much.

By Anton Z

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Jan 2, 2018

Subtitles need to be reviewed, a lot of errors and they are necessary because the speakers all have strong accents. Sometimes the transcript itself doesn't make sense at all.

By Harry J J

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Sep 2, 2021

A fairly simple approach to complex components of society. It's a good way to become familiar with the terms used by sociologists for societal behavior.

By Josef A F

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Jul 30, 2022

I think this course is very good, BUT too repetitive.

Texts and videos often cover the exact same questions and topics, things are explained too often.

By Sharon S

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Sep 21, 2021

Interesting but: too much jargon, hard to follow and missing examples in western world. Would like to see more the limitation of this theory

By Lujain A

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Jul 28, 2019

it was so confusing but I tried my best, not cause the instructor is bad, just cause there were too many similar concepts

By Rishabh S

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Apr 28, 2020

The course is not that interesting but I really like the example from the different countries that was given by UNICEF.

By Gilbert H

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Aug 15, 2020

I think this course in very important for researchers in order to get the right answers from the communities

By Bassel M A A

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Jul 5, 2017

Quizzes are very confusing and English translation is awful and full of mistakes a

By Anja J

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Feb 20, 2022

Overall a good course, however quite repetitive which was often frustrating.

By Jan S

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Feb 10, 2018

Ok course, the further you get into the course th better the lectures,

By Ni N

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Aug 7, 2020

the pace is too slow, even for the introductory level.

By Annie

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Apr 3, 2020

Easy and fun!

By Lucia K

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Oct 27, 2017

Good course!

By Ibrahima

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Mar 22, 2019

Excellent

By Sharmin K L

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Jun 26, 2022

Helpful!

By Suraj k

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May 13, 2020

I learnt to critically question how peoples behaviors are motivated. Examples from different communities were good. The language jargon could be lesser so concepts could be understood more easily.

I wish the course could have been more valuable in terms of teaching us how to measure behaviour and also in terms of the hours spent.

By Joann N B

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Oct 22, 2022

Even though the course content was factual. Most subject matter discussed throughtout the course was disgusting.

I am sad people live that way.