Using Confidence Interval-Based Estimation of Relevance to select social-cognitive determinants for behaviour change interventions

When developing an intervention aimed at behavior change, one of the crucial steps in the development process is to select the most relevant social-cognitive determinants. These determinants can be seen as the buttons one needs to push to establish behavior change. Insight into these determinants is needed to select behavior change methods (i.e., general behavior change techniques that are applied in an intervention) in the devel- opment process. Therefore, a study on determinants is often conducted as formative research in the intervention development process. Ideally, all relevant determinants identi ed in such a study are addressed by an intervention. However, when developing a behavior change intervention, there are limits in terms of, for example, resources available for intervention development and the amount of content that participants of an intervention can be exposed to. Hence, it is important to select those determinants that are most relevant to the target behavior as these determinants should be addressed in an intervention. The aim of the current paper is to introduce a novel approach to select the most relevant social-cognitive determinants and use them in intervention develop- ment. This approach is based on visualization of con dence intervals for the means and correlation coef cients for all determinants simultaneously. This visualization facilitates comparison, which is necessary when making selections. By means of a case study on the determinants of using a high dose of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (commonly known as ecstasy), we illustrate this approach. We provide a freely available tool to facilitate the analyses needed in this approach.

在开发旨在改变行为的干预措施时，开发过程中的关键步骤之一是选择最相关的社会认知决定因素。这些决定因素可视作实现行为改变的启动按钮。对这些决定因素的了解对于在开发过程中选择行为改变方法（即在干预中应用的一般行为改变技术）至关重要。因此，在干预措施的开发过程中，对决定因素的研究通常作为形成性研究进行。理想情况下，此类研究中识别出的所有相关决定因素都应由干预措施加以解决。然而，在开发行为改变干预措施时，存在诸如干预措施开发可用的资源以及干预措施参与者所能接触到的内容量等方面的限制。因此，选择与目标行为最为相关的决定因素至关重要，因为这些决定因素应在干预措施中得到关注。本研究的目的是介绍一种新的方法来选择最相关的社会认知决定因素，并将它们应用于干预措施的开发。该方法基于对所有决定因素的平均值置信区间和相关系数的同步可视化。这种可视化促进了比较，这在进行选择时是必要的。通过一项关于使用高剂量3,4-亚甲基二氧基甲基苯丙胺（通常称为摇头丸）的决定因素的案例研究，我们展示了这种方法。我们提供了一款免费工具，以促进该方法所需的各项分析。