Understanding Hard to Maintain Behaviour Change: A Dual Process Approach

Chapter 7

Interventions for behaviour change

There is a wide variety of potential interventions to change behaviour. Michie et al. [1] recently identified 93 different discrete interventions, and more are being developed. In principle, a comprehensive theory would be able to accomodate all of these interventions within the same framework and provide hypotheses about what forms of intervention or combinations thereof would be most likely to be effective in what kinds of situations. However, those that owe nothing to dual-process theories, either in genesis or ease of understanding their mechanisms, are not covered here. Interventions can be divided into tools, things used as part of the process of change: resources, sources of information and assistance from an outside change agent; and strategies, ways of approaching the task. Generally, I use the term strategies when focussing on what the person needs to do, and interventions in other cases.

Most of the interventions discussed in this chapter, and all those for which there is empirical support, have been developed independently of CEOS. Some interventions were explicitly derived from dual-process theorising, while others were not, but are, in my opinion, more explicable from within a dual-process framework. Most of the suggestions are more in the form of arguments as to why interventions in this area should work, with reviews of evidence that they might where it is available.

The interventions are organised into four basic kinds: ...