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.

In 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.

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