Melbourne Centre of Behaviour Change, University of Melbourne Australia.
Workshop aim. This workshop will identify and discuss challenges involved in understanding and applying categories of change techniques and provide a theory-based approach to employing categories of change techniques in the design, deconstruction and evaluation of behaviour change interventions.
Many lists of categories of change techniques (sometimes called “BCTs”) have been developed since an original 26 were defined by Abraham & Michie in 2008, including, for example, a list of 120 technique types that can be self-administered (Knittle et al., 2020). Such lists or taxonomies differ in how they are linked to theories of change which describe underlying mechanisms that technique types might alter, in order to initiate or maintain behaviour change. Some categories are precise and relate to particular types of intervention e.g., “provide information about health consequences” Others are vague and could apply to quite different components e.g., “add objects to the environment”. Some focus on delivery modes e.g., “use a credible source” while others refer to self-enacted psychological actions e.g., “prayer”. This variability creates challenges when using such categories in the design and reporting of intervention logic models, that is, when defining what an intervention consists of and how it is intended to work. These conceptual problems also create challenges when retrospectively deconstructing an intervention description to identify processes or components that may account for effectiveness, as in meta analytic studies (see e.g., Presseau et al., 2015).
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