Designing Effective Interventions for Health Behaviour Change: An Introduction (One-Day Summer Workshop)

Workshop Details

Many interventions which seek to promote health are dependent on effectively changing people’s behaviour – whether this is the behaviour of the public, health professionals or users of health services.  Often, our interventions fail, because we do not take account of what is really causing the behaviour or use this in developing our interventions.

Behavioural science has made significant advances within the last decade in developing methodologies available to intervention designers. For success, intervention designers should:

• Use and develop a theoretical understanding of the behaviour they wish to change and target factors which are likely to effect chang
• Describe interventions to facilitate replication (using behaviour change technique taxonomies) and to test the mechanisms of action through which interventions work

Aims and Objectives

In this workshop, participants will have an opportunity to learn about, and practice using, emerging methods for designing and evaluating behavioural interventions.

On completion of the workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Apply a structured approach to using behavioural theory for intervention development
2. Use the COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation – behaviour) model and the Behaviour Change Wheel to design interventions
3. Specify and describe intervention content using Behaviour Change Technique taxonomies
4. Test the theoretical underpinnings of interventions
5. Understand processes of change as part of intervention evaluation

The workshop will be facilitated by: Dr Molly Byrne, Health Research Board (HRB) Research Leader and Director of the Health Behaviour Change Research Group at NUI Galway, and Dr Jenny McSharry, Postdoctoral Researcher, Health Behaviour Change Research Group at NUI Galway, and Registered Health Psychologist with the UK Health and Care Professions Council.

Intended Participants

This workshop is for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and students interested in behaviour change.

Registration

Workshop fee: €50 (€30 students)  Please register here