Delivering Behaviour Change Interventions: Development of a Mode of Delivery Ontology.

Investigating and improving the effects of behaviour change interventions requires detailed and consistent specification of all aspects of interventions. An important feature of interventions is the way in which these are delivered, i.e.

Message framing to inform cancer prevention pricing interventions in the UK and USA: a factorial experiment, 2019.

Objectives: To advance understanding of how message framing can be used to maximise public support across different pricing policies for alcohol, tobacco and sugary drinks/foods that prevent consumption of cancer-causing products.

Design: We designed a 3×4×3 randomised factorial experiment to test responses to messages with three pricing policies, four message frames and three products.

Setting: Online survey panel (Qualtrics) in 2019.

Development of an Intervention Setting Ontology for behaviour change: Specifying where interventions take place.

: Contextual factors such as an intervention's setting are key to understanding how interventions to change behaviour have their effects and patterns of generalisation across contexts. The intervention's setting is not consistently reported in published reports of evaluations. Using ontologies to specify and classify intervention setting characteristics enables clear and reproducible reporting, thus aiding replication, implementation and evidence synthesis.

Do Combinations of Behavior Change Techniques That Occur Frequently in Interventions Reflect Underlying Theory?

Background: Behavioral interventions typically include multiple behavior change techniques (BCTs). The theory informing the selection of BCTs for an intervention may be stated explicitly or remain unreported, thus impeding the identification of links between theory and behavior change outcomes.

Purpose: This study aimed to identify groups of BCTs commonly occurring together in behavior change interventions and examine whether behavior change theories underlying these groups could be identified.

Development of an online tool for linking behavior change techniques and mechanisms of action based on triangulation of findings from literature synthesis and expert consensus.

Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers develop interventions to change behavior based on their understanding of how behavior change techniques (BCTs) impact the determinants of behavior. A transparent, systematic, and accessible method of linking BCTs with the processes through which they change behavior (i.e.

Development of a formal system for representing behaviour-change theories.

Use of natural language to represent behaviour-change theories has resulted in lack of clarity and consistency, hindering comparison, integration, development and use. This paper describes development of a formal system for representing behaviour-change theories that aims to improve clarity and consistency. A given theory is represented in terms of (1) its component constructs (for example, 'self-efficacy', 'perceived threat' or 'subjective norm'), which are labelled and defined, and (2) relationships between pairs of constructs, which may be causal, structural or semantic.

Author Correction: Using rigorous methods to advance behaviour change science.

In the version of this Comment originally published, the Acknowledgements section was missing information about the support from the National Institutes of Health Science of Behavior Change Common Fund Program; the full text should have read 'This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science of Behavior Change Common Fund Program through an award administered by the National Institute on Aging (U24AG052175) and by a Wellcome Trust collaborative award (The Human Behaviour-Change Project: Building the science of behaviour change for complex intervention development, 201,524/Z/16/Z).' This has now been corrected in all versions.

Links Between Behavior Change Techniques and Mechanisms of Action: An Expert Consensus Study.

Background: Understanding the mechanisms through which behavior change techniques (BCTs) can modify behavior is important for the development and evaluation of effective behavioral interventions. To advance the field, we require a shared knowledge of the mechanisms of action (MoAs) through which BCTs may operate when influencing behavior.

Purpose: To elicit expert consensus on links between BCTs and MoAs.

Behavior Change Techniques and Their Mechanisms of Action: A Synthesis of Links Described in Published Intervention Literature.

Background: Despite advances in behavioral science, there is no widely shared understanding of the "mechanisms of action" (MoAs) through which individual behavior change techniques (BCTs) have their effects. Cumulative progress in the development, evaluation, and synthesis of behavioral interventions could be improved by identifying the MoAs through which BCTs are believed to bring about change.

Purpose: This study aimed to identify the links between BCTs and MoAs described by authors of a corpus of published literature.

Impact of daylight saving time on road traffic collision risk: a systematic review.

Background: Bills have been put forward in the UK and Republic of Ireland proposing a move to Central European Time (CET). Proponents argue that such a change will have benefits for road safety, with daylight being shifted from the morning, when collision risk is lower, to the evening, when risk is higher. Studies examining the impact of daylight saving time (DST) on road traffic collision risk can help inform the debate on the potential road safety benefits of a move to CET.

Threat appeals in health communication: messages that elicit fear and enhance perceived efficacy positively impact on young male drivers.

Background: Health communications often present graphic, threat-based representations of the potential consequences of health-risk behaviours. These 'threat appeals' feature prominently in public health campaigns, but their use is controversial, with studies investigating their efficacy reporting inconsistent, and often negative, findings. This research examined the impact of a threat-based road safety advertisement on the driving behaviour of young male drivers.

From Theory-Inspired to Theory-Based Interventions: A Protocol for Developing and Testing a Methodology for Linking Behaviour Change Techniques to Theoretical Mechanisms of Action.

Background: Understanding links between behaviour change techniques (BCTs) and mechanisms of action (the processes through which they affect behaviour) helps inform the systematic development of behaviour change interventions.

Purpose: This research aims to develop and test a methodology for linking BCTs to their mechanisms of action.

Methods: Study 1 (published explicit links): Hypothesised links between 93 BCTs (from the 93-item BCT taxonomy, BCTTv1) and mechanisms of action will be identified from published interventions and their frequency, explicitness and precision documented.

The impact of threat appeals on fear arousal and driver behavior: a meta-analysis of experimental research 1990-2011.

The existing empirical research exploring the impact of threat appeals on driver behavior has reported inconsistent findings. In an effort to provide an up-to-date synthesis of the experimental findings, meta-analytic techniques were employed to examine the impact of threat-based messages on fear arousal and on lab-based indices of driving behavior. Experimental studies (k = 13, N = 3044), conducted between 1990 and 2011, were included in the analyses.

Psychological factors associated with indices of risky, reckless and cautious driving in a national sample of drivers in the Republic of Ireland.

This paper presents the results of a national survey of drivers in the Republic of Ireland that sought to examine psychological predictors of specific driving behaviours. 1638 respondents attending National Car Testing (NCT) centres nationwide completed a questionnaire battery that included personality, attitudinal, locus of control and social influence measures. The driving behaviours examined were drawn from a Driving Behaviour Scale (Iversen, 2004) and included Speeding and Rule Violation, Reckless Driving, Wearing of Seat Belts, Cautious Driving and Drink Driving.