Developing methodology for designing and evaluating theory-based complex interventions: an ontology for linking behaviour change techniques to theory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Behaviours (such as smoking, excessive alcohol use, being sedentary and eating unhealthy foods) result in serious illness and early death. Efforts to change such behaviours are a priority in most health systems. Interventions have been developed that can help support changes in these behaviours. However, these interventions are made up of many components and we often do not know which components are responsible for bringing about change nor how this change, which is often quite limited, occurs. This restricts our ability to learn from our research to inform the development of more effective interventions. There is a gap between our empirical knowledge of which techniques work and our understanding of why they work. At the present time our understanding of the mechanisms is derived from various theories which are not linked systematically either to the interventions or the mechanisms - there are many techniques and many theories - but how they link together is far from clear. The aim of this project is to establish precisely the links between behaviour change techniques and their mechanisms of action. These links provide the basis for a framework that can be updated over time and which will permit the development of more advanced intervention design and evaluation, thus speeding up the process of building our knowledge about 'what works'. At present, individual experts make judgments about links between behaviour change techniques and theoretical mechanisms, without a systematic, shared or agreed method of doing so. We therefore plan to work with a large number of international experts from many disciplines to develop a method for reaching a consensus on articulating the theoretical links between techniques and mechanisms. We will also examine the literature to investigate how behaviour change techniques have been linked with theory in published studies of behaviour change interventions. Experts will consider the combined findings of the consensus and literature-based studies to produce a large matrix of links between behaviour change techniques and theoretical mechanisms (a behaviour change 'ontology'). We will disseminate our findings so that they are reported and discussed widely and scrutinised by the international scientific community.We will provide web-based resources and give workshops to introduce this new tool, the behaviour change (BC) ontology. We believe this work will provide a more robust method for researchers to use in developing soundly based interventions and in interpreting the findings of interventions designed by other researchers, resulting in more effective interventions and health benefits.