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| BEHAVIOUR CHANGE |
Much of the work of the Hygiene Centre is concerned
with promoting hygiene in target populations through
the adoption of new technologies (for example, water
filtration or latrines) or new behavioural practices
(such as hand washing). In this way, changing behaviour
can be said to underlie all of our work, cutting across
all our other project areas.
The Hygiene Centre seeks to understand how people can
be motivated to engage in healthy practices and is developing
scientific models that can be used to explain the causes
underlying these behaviours. Understandings emerging
from this research underpin the Hygiene Centre's interventions
in behavioural change to improve public health.
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support of this agenda, Robert Aunger and Valerie Curtis
have recently developed a synthetic
framework for comparing approaches to behaviour change
in the health psychology, marketing and communication
literatures. We plan to base our own explicit model of
behaviour change within this framework; it should be applicable
to any behaviour which might be relevant to public health
using a broadly evolutionary psychological approach. This
model is currently in development, through theoretical
elaboration and fieldwork studies on changing handwashing
behaviour. This model incorporates conclusions reached
from a review
of existing studies of handwashing interventions worldwide. |
Children from Samahani Mosa in
Aceh |
Current Projects
- Development of a synthetic
general model of motivation consistent with the latest
research in neuroscience, animal behaviour and marketing
- Investigating the role of disgust
and other evolved emotions in
hygiene behaviours.
- Studies of the diffusion of
health messages through populations as a means to
scale up public health interventions
- Screening behaviour chnage interventions
in our Hygiene Wired
study.
Collaborations
- Membership in behaviour change
group, global public-private partnership to promote
hand-washing with soap.
- Membership in advisory committee,
medical research council project to survey behaviour
change theory.
- Membership in evaluation committee,
national health service LIFECHECK project.
- Steering committee global public-private
partnership for handwashing.
Key Researchers
R
Aunger
V
Curtis
A
Biran
G Judah
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