Week 2, Behaviour Change Interventions: Introductory Principles and Practice

1. What behaviour are you trying to change?

Week 1 of the course focused on identifying and specifying the target behaviour. You can see my notes from week 1 in the previous issue of this newsletter.

2. What will it take to bring about the desired change?

Week 2 introduced the COM-B model, which helps to understand the factors that influence behaviour: capability, opportunity and motivation.

In order for a behaviour to occur, people must have the capability and opportunity to engage in the behaviour and must be more motivated to carry out that behaviour than any other behaviours.

These factors are further broken down into:

• Psychological capability: "a person’s ability to perform a behaviour arising from their psychological functioning."
• Physical capability: "a person’s abilities arising from their physique and bodily functioning."
• Social opportunity: "a person’s opportunity to enact a behaviour relating to the social world they inhabit, including the rules and norms that are operating and social cues."
• Physical opportunity: "a person’s opportunity to enact a behaviour that arises from objects and events in their environment, the space they inhabit, the time available or the material and financial resources available to them."
• Automatic motivation: "motivation that involves a) responding habitually or instinctively, or b) wants and needs arising from emotions or drives."
• Reflective motivation: "psychological processes of conscious planning and decision making."

Carry out a diagnosis of the key influences on the target behaviour.

This can be done through methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, documentary analysis, observation and structured discussion. The methods used to collect information to make a COM-B diagnosis will be influenced by the intervention designer’s local context and resources.

Ask questions such as:

Capability:

• Do they have the knowledge and/or skills?

Opportunity:

• Do they have the time and equipment?

Motivation:

• Do they think it is important?
• Do they feel engaged and valued in the process?
• Do they need to change entrenched habits?

Prioritise influences and decide which to take through to the intervention design step.

After carrying out a COM-B diagnosis, involve people with expertise or lived experiences in deciding which influences to prioritise and take through to the intervention design step.

Further resources

• A description of the COM-B model can be found in A brief introduction to the COM-B Model of behaviour and the PRIME Theory of motivation, by Robert West and Susan Michie.
• The article What Influences Behaviour? by Behaviour Works Australia describes other approaches to understanding the influences on behaviour, including Robert Cialdini's principles of persuasion (which are all related to social influence), Andrew Darnton's synthesis of behavioural influences, B.J. Fogg's behaviour model, the ISM model by Andrew Darnton and persusasion/communication models. The article explains that "There is no single best behavioural influences framework. What’s best depends, for instance, on the context, relevant factors at play (e.g., cost, time, optics), time available, and, of course, personal preference and familiarity."
• Sample questions for making a COM-B diagnosis can be found in Appendix 1 of Achieving behaviour change: a guide for local government and partners.
• Behaviour Works Australia have articles about How to do a Rapid Review (to explore what the research says) and How to do a Practice Review (to gain insights from strategically-selected individuals with experience in, or knowledge of, the problem).
• One case study that shows how this can be applied is an article titled Using the COM-B model to identify barriers and facilitators towards adoption of a diet associated with cognitive function (MIND diet).

Application

In my personal life, I have used the sample questions for making a COM-B diagnosis to help me to think about how to fit in twice-daily physiotherapy exercises to help my recovery from a car accident that I was involved in this week. This helped me to come up with ideas to improve my capability (such as printing out the instructions from the physiotherapist, setting a reminder on my calendar and setting up a custom workout on my Apple watch to help with timing the stretches), opportunity (how to make time for the sessions and fit them into my daily routines) and motivation (making it more pleasurable by listening to music or an audiobook while doing the exercises and reminding myself of the consequences of doing or not doing the exercises). The questions also helped me to identify times and circumstances that might make it harder to carry out the exercises.

At work, these questions will help me to identify which approaches might be most helpful to reduce behaviours that pose a cybersecurity risk. For example, reducing behaviours such as clicking on links in emails from unfamiliar senders might require training about how to check the sender of an email and what to look for (psychological capability). Reducing behaviours such as using USB flash drives might require an approach that shares alternative resources to store and share data (psychological capability and physical opportunity). Increasing the behaviour of locking the screen might require approaches that build habits, for example providing a sense of satisfaction from completing the behaviour until it becomes routine (automatic motivation).

Sara Styles shared with me a great resource by CertNZ: Cyber Change: Behavioural insights for being secure online, which breaks down common online security barriers by capability, opportunity and motivation and suggests strategies to improve secure online behaviours.