Summary: Broadly speaking, approaches to understanding behaviour and developing behaviour change interventions are either rooted in psychology, focusing on motivation and the social and contextual factors that influence it, or economics, based on rational choice theory. Both these traditions bring rich insights to understanding behaviour but suffer from the ‘intention-action’ gap in the case of the former and the problem of understanding and influencing preferences in terms of the latter. To address these issues, researchers at ICF have developed an integrated model of behaviour, a holistic approach to understanding behaviour that nests existing theories and models and extends them to cover important aspects of behaviour and behaviour change not commonly a focus within the behaviour change movement. This talk will introduce the model and describe how it is being used in a number of recent of current projects.
Speaker bio: Matt Barnard is a consulting director at ICF and director of its Centre for Behaviour Change. He has 20 years’ experience as a behavioural scientist, social researcher and evaluator and is the developer of the integrated model of behaviour, a new approach to understanding behaviour that nests and integrates a wide range of existing approaches (including COM-B and classical and behavioural economics) along the whole of the behavioural pathway. He has led research teams at the Behavioural Insights Team and at the UK Health Security Agency, where he was head of social interventions and behaviour evaluation and led the organisation’s work on measuring isolation compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding and evaluating interventions aimed at supporting compliance. He is currently leading a range of research studies, including two randomised controlled trials of interventions aimed at preventing youth violence and a project exploring the barriers to GPs increasing prescribing lengths in Wales and identifying interventions to support the transition. Matt holds and MA (Cantab) in history and economics, a PGCert in econometrics, and a PhD in social research and evaluation from the University of Cambridge.
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