Johnston Marie
Aberdeen Health Psychology Group, Institute of Applied Health Sciences, Aberdeen, UK.
Health Psychol Behav Med. 2021 Jun 21;9(1):567-581. doi: 10.1080/21642850.2021.1939701.
ehaviour change is a key to addressing many health and healthcare problems and interventions have been designed to improve health outcomes. These behaviour change interventions have been evaluated in many ways, including randomised controlled trials, and over recent decades there has been considerable progress in the conduct and reporting these studies. This paper is a personal retrospection on the changes occurring that have resulted in our current improved methods and their potential for future advancement.
There has been steady development of methods for conducting trials, including advances in statistical methods enabled by increase computing power and programmes, greater attention to the recruitment of participants and in the specification of outcomes. Trial reporting has improved, largely due to publication of guidelines for reporting interventions and trials, but until recently the reporting of behaviour change interventions has been quite limited. Developments in the specification of active ingredients of these interventions, the behaviour change techniques, has transformed our ability to report interventions in a manner that facilitates evidence synthesis and enables replication and implementation. However, further work using ontological approaches is needed to adequately represent the evidence contained in the mass of accumulated studies. Meanwhile, attention is gradually being paid to the comparator groups in trials leading to better reporting but with continuing challenges about how control groups are selected.
These developments are important for the advancements of behavioural science - but also in consolidating the expertise needed to address global social, environmental and health challenges.
行为改变是解决许多健康和医疗保健问题的关键，并且已经设计了干预措施来改善健康结果。这些行为改变干预措施已经通过多种方式进行了评估，包括随机对照试验，并且在最近几十年里，在开展和报告这些研究方面已经取得了相当大的进展。本文是对所发生变化的个人回顾，这些变化导致了我们目前改进的方法及其未来进步的潜力。
进行试验的方法一直在稳步发展，包括随着计算能力和程序的提高而在统计方法上取得的进展，对参与者招募和结果规范的更多关注。试验报告有所改进，这在很大程度上归功于干预措施和试验报告指南的发布，但直到最近，行为改变干预措施的报告一直相当有限。这些干预措施的活性成分即行为改变技术的规范发展，改变了我们以促进证据综合、实现复制和实施的方式报告干预措施的能力。然而，需要使用本体论方法进行进一步的工作，以充分呈现大量积累研究中包含的证据。与此同时，试验中的对照群组逐渐受到关注，这导致了更好的报告，但在如何选择对照组方面仍然存在挑战。
这些发展对于行为科学的进步很重要——但对于巩固应对全球社会、环境和健康挑战所需的专业知识也很重要。
