Understanding behaviour change

Posted by Andrew Wadge on August 1st 2008 in Science in Government

Finding effective means of helping people choose, cook and eat safe, healthy food just isn’t as easy as some of us might hope. We know that interventions to encourage people to adopt healthy lifestyles need to provide more than information alone. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the Agency has used a range of approaches to help people choose safe, healthy food and also conducted research to help determine their effectiveness.

Indeed, it’s a hot topic for anyone with an interest in public policy, judging from the rush to review ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’, a new American book recently published on the subject. You can read reviews from the Times online and the Guardian on their websites.

Our social scientists and nutritionists have been drawing upon their experiences to contribute to a Government Social Research Knowledge Review on the evidence on theory and principles of behaviour change. The review published last week will provide additional help to those individuals and organisations working with people to help change their lifestyle behaviour, including the food they choose.

The practical guide contains nine principles that will be helpful for those in the Agency who want to know how to go about applying the models in practice. The next phase of work will examine the empirical evidence base and consider how models are applied in the UK public sector context.

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French public health project has generation's worth of data

Posted by Peter (not verified) on 01/09/2008 - 23:31

I am sure that you and your colleagues are probably familiar with the extensive body of work carried out in France since the early 1990s in the Lille dormitory towns of Fleurbaix and Laventie. If not, it is worth a closer look, because time is not on anyone's side and they already have more than 15 years' worth of data.

This long-term programme demonstrated a cost-effective and workable way of teaching primary school children sustainable eating habits. The children involved took what they learnt home with them and in turn reverse-engineered their family's eating habits in the home.

These towns now perform well above the national average for a range of key health indicators. The programme is cost effective, too: the education element over these years has been very cheap, a fraction of the money invested to determine its effectiveness.

From memory, research spending might have been around 75 euros per head of population per year during this time to develop what is now a proactive public health policy. This is now being rolled out to a further group of towns under the second phase of the French national nutrition and health plan PNNS2.

Still from memory, the additional educational element of this programme's budget could have been something like 10% of the background research programme, although the French education system might well spend more to start with than its UK counterparts on food education.

Put the search string "Fleurbaix Laventie Ville Sante" into a search engine and you'll find plenty of information, mainly in French.

Regards,

Peter Crosskey

Principles or common sense?

Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on 12/08/2008 - 08:51

The GSR review makes an interesting read but, as is often the case with Government publications, the so-called grand "principles" are so vague and obvious as to be useless for all practical purposes. It is for instance difficult to disagree with the idea that one should "identify the audience groups and target behaviours" (principle 1), "select the key influencing factors" (principle 3)or "identify effective intervention techniques (principle 4)", to say nothing of the even more obvious pilot/evaluate/feedback principles. This is all well-known stuff for anybody familiar with project appraisal. I am left wondering whether social scientists produce any insights of use to policy makers.