Читать книгу Health Psychology - Michael Murray - Страница 127

Interventions are deliberate attempts to facilitate improvements to health. The idea for the intervention can come from a theory or model, from discussions with those who are knowledgeable about the condition or situation that needs to be changed, or from ‘out of the blue’.

A key aspect of designing and/or implementing any intervention is evaluation – attempting to prove whether or not the intervention is effective or efficacious. Furthermore, reports of intervention studies are typically brief, opaque descriptions of what can often be complex interventions.

Reports of behaviour change studies typically provide brief summaries of what in reality may be a highly complex and unique intervention. One problem is that there is no meaningful method of classifying interventions for behaviour change into any single theory or method of description.

There is no meaningful method of relating the practice of behaviour change to any single theory or taxonomy. This means that the researcher does not know how to label what they have done in a way that communicates this in any precise manner to others (Marks, 2009). A key criterion for the reporting of an intervention must be transparency. Can another person or group repeat the study in his/her/their own setting with his/her/their own participants? The need to be concise in publishing studies means that the level of detail required for successful replication may often be missing. It is therefore almost impossible for new investigators to repeat a published intervention with any exactitude in their own settings.