Behaviour Change Interventions: Introductory Principles and Practice

Explore behaviour change frameworks, and how they can be used to enable behaviour change in yourself and others, with this online behavioural science course from UCL.

Duration

4 weeks

Weekly study

3 hours

Premium course

What's included?

Learn how to change important behaviours in your personal or professional life

People all over the world are facing multiple serious threats to their well-being. From global warming to the burden of chronic disease, there is a need for different disciplines and professionals to work together towards a common purpose of helping people to behave differently.

On this course, you’ll be supported to think about problems in terms of behaviours and apply principles and practices that can enable change.

Discover why behavioural science is important

Using frameworks based on behavioural science, you’ll learn a systematic method for developing interventions.

You’ll consider how to define a behaviour, and then see how to distinguish behaviours from what influences them and the outcomes they lead to.

Explore behaviour change tools

You’ll be introduced to three behavioural science tools, understand how they link together, and how they can be applied. You will also learn how to select key behaviours from a ‘system’ of behaviours.

As you find out how to think about behaviours in their context, you’ll conduct a ‘behavioural diagnosis’ to understand what influences them, and develop appropriate intervention strategies.

To understand behaviours and design interventions to change them, you will become familiar with the Capability Opportunity Motivation – Behaviour (COM-B) model, the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), and the Behaviour Change Techniques Taxonomy (BCTT).

From behavioural science interventions to policies

Behavioural science experts at UCL will guide you through different types of behaviour change intervention and related policy options.

You’ll leave this course understanding key principles and practices of behaviour change. You’ll learn how to apply these to the problems you want to tackle and emerge confident about how to change behaviours for the better.

What topics will you cover?

The course is based on the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) framework which provides a method for intervention design. Specifically, learners will be introduced to three behavioural science tools and understand how they interlink and can be applied as a system in order to select target behaviours, conduct a behavioural diagnosis and develop intervention strategies and policies to change behaviour. The three tools are the Capability Opportunity Motivation – Behaviour (COM-B) model, the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) and the Behaviour Change Techniques Taxonomy (BCTTv1). It covers the following topics:

  • Defining and selecting behaviours to change
  • An introduction to the COM-B model (a theoretical model that can be used to understand influences on a target behaviour)
  • Applying the COM-B model to understand influences on a target behaviour (conducting a behavioural diagnosis)
  • Intervention Types and Policy Options and how to select amongst them as part of intervention design
  • Behaviour Change Techniques (BCT) and how to select amongst them as part of intervention design

This course is designed to be completed across a four week period. Content will be released week by week and the course will close with a live Q&A session with the educators in week four.

More courses you might like

Learners who joined this course have also enjoyed these courses.

©2025  onlincourse.com. All rights reserved