TY - JOUR
T1 - Acyclic behavior change diagrams
T2 - a tool to report and analyze interventions
AU - Metz, Gido
AU - Peters, Gjalt-Jorn Ygram
AU - Crutzen, Rik
N1 - © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - BACKGROUND: Behavior change interventions have a vital role in enhancing human health and well-being. Nevertheless, concerns have been raised about suboptimal reporting of behavior change interventions, making analyses, replications, and intervention re-use hard or impossible to conduct.OBJECTIVE: This paper introduces acyclic behavior change diagrams (ABCDs) to achieve more transparent development, evaluation, and reporting of behavior change interventions. ABCDs are a visual representation of the assumptions regarding causal-structural chains that underlie putative active ingredients of behavior change interventions. These causal-structural chains link the behavior change principles that are applied in an intervention to the (determinants of) behavior targeted in that intervention.CONCLUSIONS: ABCDs are helpful in making implicit assumptions explicit and help communicate assumptions with team members and other stakeholders. Moreover, we believe they make evaluation easier, and their machine-readability allows for ABCDs to be imported directly into (systematic review) databases with negligible costs while disclosing complete and accurate data. Finally, the ABCD approach fits well with other initiatives to gain a deeper understanding and synthesis of the literature on active intervention elements.
AB - BACKGROUND: Behavior change interventions have a vital role in enhancing human health and well-being. Nevertheless, concerns have been raised about suboptimal reporting of behavior change interventions, making analyses, replications, and intervention re-use hard or impossible to conduct.OBJECTIVE: This paper introduces acyclic behavior change diagrams (ABCDs) to achieve more transparent development, evaluation, and reporting of behavior change interventions. ABCDs are a visual representation of the assumptions regarding causal-structural chains that underlie putative active ingredients of behavior change interventions. These causal-structural chains link the behavior change principles that are applied in an intervention to the (determinants of) behavior targeted in that intervention.CONCLUSIONS: ABCDs are helpful in making implicit assumptions explicit and help communicate assumptions with team members and other stakeholders. Moreover, we believe they make evaluation easier, and their machine-readability allows for ABCDs to be imported directly into (systematic review) databases with negligible costs while disclosing complete and accurate data. Finally, the ABCD approach fits well with other initiatives to gain a deeper understanding and synthesis of the literature on active intervention elements.
U2 - 10.1080/21642850.2022.2149930
DO - 10.1080/21642850.2022.2149930
M3 - Article
C2 - 36518605
SN - 2164-2850
VL - 10
SP - 1216
EP - 1228
JO - Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine
JF - Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine
IS - 1
ER -