Most decisions in policy, service or communications development are made by people who are not behavioural science experts, and they do not need to be. However, behavioural science can add value to the efforts of nearly all practitioners and policy makers – supporting that development is a major goal for the Unit. Developing an understanding of the basic principles of behavioural science and how to enable its application within a project, team, or organisation are key to increasing its use across the system.
Interest in behavioural science is quickly building, there are some great resources, tools, and guidance already out there for you to learn from and apply in your everyday practice. In addition to sharing our own resources, we have collated what we have found useful in the pages below.
We’ve split them up depending on which step in the behavioural science process you’re currently at, more details about the steps can be found here.
Please note that some of the information links included are from external organisations and no Welsh language equivalent is available. We apologise for this.
Define
Diagnose
Select Intervention Type
Select Implementation Type
Build Intervention
Deliver
General
| Title | Author | Description | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Achieving Behaviour Change: A Guide for National Government | Public Health England | A guide to applying behavioural science for national governments | View resource |
| Behavioural and Social Drivers of vaccination: Tools and Practical Guidance for Achieving High Uptake | World Health Organisation | Behavioural and soial drivers of vaccination: tools and practical guidance for achieving high uptake. | View webpage |
| Create a Custom Dataset | Office for National Statistics | Build custom data sets to get to know your population better through census data. | View webpage |
| Deciding on a target behaviour and target population tool | Behavioural Science Unit | A practical, interactive tool to help you consider and define your target behaviour and target population, as you create a ‘behavioural specification’. | View resource |
| Decision Support for Behavioural and Social Science Frameworks for Public Health | Behavioural Science Public Health Network and Department for Health and Social Care | The tool is designed for practitioners and policy makers working in public health who want to use frameworks or methods from the behavioural or social sciences to improve services or processes where behaviour may play a part. It is primarily designed for those without specialist knowledge of the behavioural and social sciences, although it is hoped it will be useful for all practitioners. The decision support tool is a single page matrix, designed to be kept to hand to refer to whenever working on something that might benefit from the application of Behavioural Science. It proposes models and frameworks that can be used at various stages in the development of an intervention. | View resource |
| Enabling Behaviour Change | Department for Transport | This guidance outlines some of the key issues to consider in the development of initiatives which seek to enable changes in people’s travel behaviour and offers practical tips when considering options for addressing barriers to sustainable behaviours. | View webpage |
| Encouraging Hand Hygiene in the Community | British Psychological Society | A summary of COM-B based insights and ready-to-take actions on how to increase hand washing behaviour in the community with focus on Covid-19. | View resource |
| Everyone Knows What Behaviour Is But They Just Don’t Agree On It | Calhoun, AJ and El Hady, A | This resource describes a survey that identifed how the term ‘‘behaviour’’ is used, and what it means in different academic communities, showing that important differences exist and sharing six behaviour clusters and seven archetype clusters. | View webpage |
| Fingertips | Office for Health Improvement & Disparities | Fingertips is a large public health data collection organised into themed profiles for various health topics and indicators. | View webpage |
| Health In Europe Podcast: Mind Over Matter: The Influence of Behavioural and Cultural Factors on Health Outcomes | World Health Organisation | Behavioral and cultural insights utilize social sciences to tackle ongoing health issues. In this conversation Bhanu Bhatnagar, Press and Media Relations Officer at WHO Regional Office for Europe, spoke with Dr Saad Omer, Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, to find out more about why behavioural and cultural insights matter to public health. | View webpage |
| Improving health and wellbeing: A guide to using behavioural science in policy and practice (Behavioural Science Unit) | Behavioural Science Unit | A guide for practitioners and policy makers explaining how behavioural science can be used and applied in practice | View resource |
| NOMIS | Office for National Statistics | Nomis is a service provided by Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics which publishes statistics related to population, society and the labour market at national, regional and local levels. These include data from current and previous censuses. | View webpage |
| Optimising Vaccination Uptake for Covid-19 | British Psychological Society | High level health psychology insight into optimising policies and communication on communicable disease prevention with a focus on COVID-19. | View resource |
| System Tools for Complex Health Systems | Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research | Information on why systems thinking is important, and how to develop causal loop diagrams to help identify key leverage points within a complex health system | View webpage |
| The BASIC Toolkit: Tools and Ethics for Applied BehSci | Observatory for Public Sector Innovation | Methodology that looks at behaviours, analysis, strategies, interventions and change (BASIC) | View resource |
| The Method Book | Monash Univeristy and Behaviour Works, Australia | Guidance on the methods and tools Behaviour Works use to change behaviour | View webpage |
| The TAP Quick Guide: A Practical Handbook for Implementing Tailoring Antimicrobial Resistance Programmes | World Health Organisation | This Tailoring Antimicrobial Resistance Programmes (TAP) Quick Guide has been developed to address the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The TAP Quick Guide is designed to identify appropriate and feasible interventions using a behavioural insights approach. | View webpage |