A taxonomy of behavior change techniques used in interventions.

By C. Abraham, Susan Michie. Health Psychology, 2008

2,648 citations recorded by the source corpus.

OBJECTIVE Without standardized definitions of the techniques included in behavior change interventions, it is difficult to faithfully replicate effective interventions and challenging to identify techniques contributing to effectiveness across interventions. This research aimed to develop and test a theory-linked taxonomy of generally applicable behavior change techniques (BCTs). DESIGN Twenty-six BCTs were defined. Two psychologists used a 5-page coding manual to independently judge the presence or absence of each technique in published intervention descriptions and in intervention manuals. RESULTS Three systematic reviews yielded 195 published descriptions. Across 78 reliability tests (i.e., 26 techniques applied to 3 reviews), the average kappa per technique was 0.79, with 93% of judgments being agreements. Interventions were found to vary widely in the range and type of techniques used, even when targeting the same behavior among similar participants. The average agreement for intervention manuals was 85%, and a comparison of BCTs identified in 13 manuals and 13 published articles describing the same interventions generated a technique correspondence rate of 74%, with most mismatches (73%) arising from identification of a technique in the manual but not in the article. CONCLUSIONS These findings demonstrate the feasibility of developing standardized definitions of BCTs included in behavioral interventions and highlight problematic variability in the reporting of intervention content.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/192b2b4df2b7fbf4c09b95d1709ded69de3c07b2

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In Applied Psychology

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Persuasive System Design Does Matter: A Systematic Review of Adherence to Web-Based Interventions (2012, background): “Strikingly, rehearsal, which is also seen as very important in learning and behavior change [37, 38], is seldom employed.”
Implementation strategies: recommendations for specifying and reporting (2013, background): “Colquhoun HL, Brehaut JC, Sales A, Ivers N, Grimshaw J, Michie S, Carroll K, Cahlifoux M, Eva KW: A systematic review of the use of theory in randomized controlled trials of audit and feedback.”
Theories and techniques of behaviour change: Developing a cumulative science of behaviour change (2012, background): “Several behaviour-specific classifications of BCTs have been developed in recent years in relation to different behaviour types: physical activity and healthy eating (Abraham & Michie, 2008 ; Michie, Ashford, et al, 2011 ), smoking (Michie, Hyder, Walia, & West, 2011 ; West, Evans, & Michie, 201”
The Person-Based Approach to Intervention Development: Application to Digital Health-Related Behavior Change Interventions (2015, background): “Theory-based approaches have provided valuable frameworks and models for anticipating and describing the likely influences on behavior [25-27], which can then be mapped onto appropriate behavior change techniques [28].”
An Exploratory Study of “Quantitative Linguistic Feedback” (2013, background): “…that incorporating these theoretically based behavior change techniques into health promotion interventions is essential to stimulating sustainable behaviorchange and advancing the science of behavior change (Abraham & Michie, 2008; Michie et al., 2005; Michie, Jochelson, Markham, & Bridle, 2009).”
Using the Internet to Promote Health Behavior Change: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Impact of Theoretical Basis, Use of Behavior Change Techniques, and Mode of Delivery on Efficacy (2010, methodology): “The behavior change techniques used in the interventions were coded using an augmented 40-item version [52] of the 26-item taxonomy developed by Abraham and Michie [13] (see Table 2 for a list of techniques).”
Self-regulation: an important construct in health psychology research and practice (2010, background): “In fact, there has been excellent recent advances in identifying and classifying the components and mapping them on to the theory-based constructs, making it very clear which constructs are considered the ‘active ingredients’ of interventions targeting behaviour change (Abraham & Graham-Rowe, 2009 ”