Article 

Grouping

From: Michie, S., van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation Science, 6(1).

The behaviour change wheel is the result of a systematic review of change models, frameworks, and theories, followed by the subsequent realisation that they were not aligned and describing different things.

This therefore gives a nice summary of behaviour interventions and policy categories to guide change in multiple contexts particularly when trying to influence large-scale change across population groups.

This is not designed as a linear model as each section on the wheel can interact with multiple other sections but rather aims to show the different mechansims in one succinct diagram.

Michie et al.’s COM-B behavioural model

COM-B is a simple descriptive model of behaviour whch outlines three contributing factors of Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation. Each can independentally activate behaviour but often influence each other so that having capability and the opportunity increases motivation and thus likelihood of a behaviour. Each of these has two subsets, for example, Capability has physical capability and psychological capability.

From this there are nine intervention functions and these will be related to the behaviour. This serves as a taxonomy of interventions.

    1. Environmental restructuring
    2. Restrictions
    3. Education
    4. Persuasion
    5. Incentivisation
    6. Coercion
    7. Training
    8. Enablement
    9. Modelling

On top of these there are seven policy categories

    1. Guidelines
    2. Environmental / Social Planning
    3. Communication / Marketing
    4. Legislation
    5. Service Provision
    6. Regulation
    7. Fiscal Measures

This therefore gives, firstly, a comprehensive tool to anaylse behavioural change processes, and secondly, a taxonomy of change and how to initiate this particulalry in society and governmental contexts.

Simple Takeaways

    • Capabilities + Opportunity + Motivation = Behaviour
    • There are nine types of intervention
    • There are seven policy categories

© leading brains 2022

References

Michie, S., van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011).
The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation Science, 6(1).
https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-6-42

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