Susan Michie, DPhil Building the science of behaviour change
Tuesday, April 28, 2015 2:30-3:30 p.m. BCBS Auditorium
Interventions to change behaviour have had modest and variable success. Interventions are complex in that they are usually made up of several interacting component behaviour change techniques delivered in a variety of contexts. If we are to develop more effective interventions, we need to understand variation in intervention effects and mechanisms of action of effective interventions. Achieving this will require improving the scientific methods we use to study and change behaviour. These include methods to specify the content, that is, the potentially active ingredients within interventions, and to apply theory to intervention development and evaluation in a more rigorous fashion to enable efficient accumulation of evidence and refinement of theories.
Speaker information Susan Michie, DPhil is professor of health psychology and director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London, UK. She completed her undergraduate and doctoral education in psychology at the University of Oxford and her clinical psychology training at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. She is a chartered clinical and health psychologist and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the European Health Psychology Society and the British Psychological Society.
Dr. Michie’s research focuses on behavior change in relation to health: how to understand it theoretically and apply theory to intervention development and evaluation, and to evidence synthesis. This research is conducted in the domains of risky and preventive behaviors amongst the general population (e.g., smoking), managing illness (e.g., medication adherence) and professional practice and implementation (e.g., hand-hygiene amongst hospital staff). Her work includes developing and evaluating digital interventions and investigating the fidelity of delivery of interventions. Her research develops methods to advance the study of behavior change, including frameworks such as the Behaviour Change Wheel and the Theoretical Domains Framework, and specifying intervention content using taxonomies of behavior change techniques (BCT Taxonomy v1).