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Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes

Despite the importance of behaviours in promoting health and wellness, persuading people to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours remains a significant public health challenge. Considerable progress has been made in developing and testing theories about the personal, social, environmental and structu...

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Autores principales: Rimal, Rajiv N, Lapinski, Maria Knight
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: World Health Organization 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8542264/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34737475
http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.285363
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author Rimal, Rajiv N
Lapinski, Maria Knight
author_facet Rimal, Rajiv N
Lapinski, Maria Knight
author_sort Rimal, Rajiv N
collection PubMed
description Despite the importance of behaviours in promoting health and wellness, persuading people to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours remains a significant public health challenge. Considerable progress has been made in developing and testing theories about the personal, social, environmental and structural drivers of behaviours. However, theorizing about behaviours themselves has remained elusive, as evidenced by the absence of a widely accepted taxonomy of behaviours. By carefully examining the nature of behaviours, practitioners and researchers can identify the most effective ways to promote behavioural change. We propose attribute-centred theorizing as an approach for defining behaviours based on their relevant properties, which can then assist in developing a taxonomy of behaviours and theorizing about them. Behaviours differ because of their underlying properties; for example, some behaviours are addictive, others are publicly observable and others are expensive. Addictiveness, privacy and cost are therefore three (of the many) attributes relevant for theorizing about behaviours. We describe a framework for operationalizing attribute-centred theorizing, which includes generating behavioural attributes, verifying and testing those attributes, and constructing a behavioural matrix to inform campaigns or interventions. We illustrate this framework using the examples of Guinea-worm disease and cardiovascular diseases. The benefits of our approach include the ability to inform intervention development and the ability to generalize across different behaviours; however, more research on converting the behavioural matrix into actual policy is needed.
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spelling pubmed-85422642021-11-03 Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes Rimal, Rajiv N Lapinski, Maria Knight Bull World Health Organ Policy & Practice Despite the importance of behaviours in promoting health and wellness, persuading people to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours remains a significant public health challenge. Considerable progress has been made in developing and testing theories about the personal, social, environmental and structural drivers of behaviours. However, theorizing about behaviours themselves has remained elusive, as evidenced by the absence of a widely accepted taxonomy of behaviours. By carefully examining the nature of behaviours, practitioners and researchers can identify the most effective ways to promote behavioural change. We propose attribute-centred theorizing as an approach for defining behaviours based on their relevant properties, which can then assist in developing a taxonomy of behaviours and theorizing about them. Behaviours differ because of their underlying properties; for example, some behaviours are addictive, others are publicly observable and others are expensive. Addictiveness, privacy and cost are therefore three (of the many) attributes relevant for theorizing about behaviours. We describe a framework for operationalizing attribute-centred theorizing, which includes generating behavioural attributes, verifying and testing those attributes, and constructing a behavioural matrix to inform campaigns or interventions. We illustrate this framework using the examples of Guinea-worm disease and cardiovascular diseases. The benefits of our approach include the ability to inform intervention development and the ability to generalize across different behaviours; however, more research on converting the behavioural matrix into actual policy is needed. World Health Organization 2021-11-01 2021-08-30 /pmc/articles/PMC8542264/ /pubmed/34737475 http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.285363 Text en (c) 2021 The authors; licensee World Health Organization. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution IGO License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/legalcode (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In any reproduction of this article there should not be any suggestion that WHO or this article endorse any specific organization or products. The use of the WHO logo is not permitted. This notice should be preserved along with the article's original URL.
spellingShingle Policy & Practice
Rimal, Rajiv N
Lapinski, Maria Knight
Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
title Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
title_full Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
title_fullStr Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
title_full_unstemmed Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
title_short Attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
title_sort attribute-centred theorizing to address behavioural changes
topic Policy & Practice
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8542264/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34737475
http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.285363
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