Assessing the Impact of Engagement and Real- Time Feedback in a Mobile Behavior Change Intervention for Supporting Critical Thinking in Engineering Research Projects

Research is defined as an activity that creates new knowledge. This is often misunderstood in the engineering community as necessarily requiring a scientific contribution that advances the theory of some matter related to engineering materials or processes. Consequently, typical engineering research projects investigate physical phenomena thought likely to be interesting in potential applications or to describe the characteristics of processes used in engineering work. The results of such projects provide a fragmented, abstracted view of the phenomena investigated, which is difficult to use in engineering decision making related to contextualised situations. This chapter shows how the actual design of engineered artefacts is research because it provides knowledge of the impact of the integration of various elements of existing knowledge, which demonstrates the properties of the designs achieved through the design work and leads to discovery of solutions to the various challenges of integration discovered through the project which attempts to achieve the integration.

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Design and rationale of the Longitudinal Evaluation of Norms and Networks Study (LENNS): A cluster-randomized trial assessing the impact of a norms-centric intervention on exclusive toilet use and maintenance in peri urban communities of Tamil Nadu

10.1101/2020.06.26.20140830 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sania Ashraf ◽

Cristina Bicchieri ◽

Maryann G. Delea ◽

Upasak Das ◽

Kavita Chauhan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Behavior Change ◽

Randomized Trial ◽

Low Income ◽

Tamil Nadu ◽

Cluster Randomized Trial ◽

List Type ◽

Behavior Change Intervention ◽

Ex Ante ◽

Cluster Randomized ◽

The Impact

AbstractIntroductionInconsistent toilet usage is a continuing challenge in India. Despite the impact of social expectations on toilet usage, few programs and studies have developed theoretically grounded norms-centric behavior change interventions to increase toilet use in low-income settings. This protocol details the rationale and design of an ex-ante, parallel cluster-randomized trial evaluating the impact of a demand-side, norms-centric behavior change intervention on exclusive toilet use and maintenance in peri-urban Tamil Nadu, India.Methods and AnalysisFollowing two years of formative research, we developed an evidence-based norm-centric behavior change intervention called Nam Nalavazhvu (Tamil for “Our wellbeing”). The multi-level intervention aims to shift collective beliefs by shifting empirical expectations or beliefs about other relevant people’s sanitation practices. It also provides action-oriented information to aid individuals to set goals and overcome barriers to build, consistently use and maintain their toilets. This trial includes 76 wards in Pudukkottai and Karur districts, where half were randomly assigned to receive the intervention and the remaining serve as counterfactuals. During baseline and endline (conducted one year after the initiation of intervention) assessments, we collect relevant data and compare results between study arms to determine the impacts of the Nam Nalavazhvu intervention on sanitation-related behavioral, health, wellbeing outcomes and potential moderators. This study is powered to detect differences in the prevalence of exclusive toilet use between study arms. We will also conduct a process evaluation to understand the extent to which the intervention was implemented, as designed.Ethics and DisseminationThe study protocol has been reviewed and approved by the ethics board at the University of Pennsylvania, USA and the Catalyst Foundation, India. Research findings will be disseminated through open access peer reviewed publications and presentations to stakeholders, government officials and conferences.Trial registrationNCT04269824.Strengths and limitations of this studyThis ex-ante, parallel cluster randomized trial assesses the impact of a norm-centric behavior change intervention strategy to improve sanitation practices. These behavior change techniques are novel to the sanitation sector but has been effective in changing a variety of behaviors, such as water use, drinking behavior, and energy consumption.The study outcomes include health, wellbeing outcomes, and a careful assessment of changes in social beliefs, expectations, and social determinants of collective sanitation behaviors.This study is being rolled out during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This can potentially impact the effectiveness of this intervention package that uses community and network-based group activities. However, through a detailed process monitoring and evaluation we will be able to assess the impact on delivery, and subsequent behavior change in this unique setting.

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Examining the Impact of a Mobile Health Behavior Change Intervention with a brief in-person component for Cancer Survivors with Overweight/Obesity: Randomized Controlled Trial (Preprint)

JMIR mhealth and uhealth ◽

10.2196/24915 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jane C Walsh ◽

Janice Richmond ◽

Jenny McSharry ◽

AnnMarie Groarke ◽

Liam Glynn ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Randomized Controlled Trial ◽

Health Behavior ◽

Behavior Change ◽

Cancer Survivors ◽

Mobile Health ◽

Controlled Trial ◽

Health Behavior Change ◽

Behavior Change Intervention ◽

Randomized Controlled ◽

The Impact

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Norms and Social Network–Centric Behavior Change Intervention (Nam Nalavazhvu) for Improved Toilet Usage in Peri-Urban Communities of Tamil Nadu: Protocol for a Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.24407 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Sania Ashraf ◽

Cristina Bicchieri ◽

Maryann G Delea ◽

Upasak Das ◽

Kavita Chauhan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Behavior Change ◽

Low Income ◽

Tamil Nadu ◽

Controlled Trial ◽

Well Being ◽

Baseline Survey ◽

Behavior Change Intervention ◽

Behavior Change Interventions ◽

Cluster Randomized ◽

The Impact

BACKGROUND Inconsistent toilet usage is a continuing challenge in India. Despite the impact of social expectations on toilet usage, few programs and studies have developed theoretically grounded norm-centric behavior change interventions to increase toilet use in low-income settings. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to detail the rationale and design of an ex ante, parallel cluster-randomized trial evaluating the impact of a demand-side, norm-centric behavior change intervention on exclusive toilet use and maintenance in peri-urban Tamil Nadu, India. METHODS Following formative research, we developed an evidence-based norm-centric behavior change intervention called Nam Nalavazhvu (Tamil for “our well-being”). The multilevel intervention aims to improve toilet usage by shifting empirical expectations or beliefs about other relevant people’s sanitation practices. It also provides action-oriented information to aid individuals to set goals and overcome barriers to own, consistently use, and maintain their toilets. This trial includes 76 wards in the Pudukkottai and Karur districts, where half were randomly assigned to receive the intervention and the remaining served as counterfactuals. RESULTS We enrolled wards and conducted a baseline survey among randomly selected individuals in all 76 wards. The 1-year behavior change intervention is currently ongoing. At the endline, we will collect relevant data and compare results between study arms to determine the impacts of the Nam Nalavazhvu intervention on sanitation-related behavioral, health, and well-being outcomes and potential moderators. This study is powered to detect differences in the prevalence of exclusive toilet use between study arms. We are also conducting a process evaluation to understand the extent to which the intervention was implemented as designed, given the special pandemic context. CONCLUSIONS Findings from this trial will inform norm-centric behavior change strategies to improve exclusive toilet usage. CLINICALTRIAL ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04269824; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04269824 INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT DERR1-10.2196/24407

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Increasing the impact of behavior change intervention research: Is there a role for stakeholder engagement?

Health Psychology ◽

10.1037/hea0000723 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 38 (4) ◽

pp. 290-296 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Molly Byrne

Keyword(s):

Behavior Change ◽

Stakeholder Engagement ◽

Intervention Research ◽

Behavior Change Intervention ◽

The Impact

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Engineering Design as Research

Research Methodologies, Innovations and Philosophies in Software Systems Engineering and Information Systems ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-0179-6.ch020 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 389-402 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Timothy L.J. Ferris

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Research Projects ◽

Design Work ◽

Engineering Research ◽

Is Research ◽

New Knowledge ◽

Potential Applications ◽

Actual Design ◽

Physical Phenomena ◽

The Impact

Research is defined as an activity that creates new knowledge. This is often misunderstood in the engineering community as necessarily requiring a scientific contribution that advances the theory of some matter related to engineering materials or processes. Consequently, typical engineering research projects investigate physical phenomena thought likely to be interesting in potential applications or to describe the characteristics of processes used in engineering work. The results of such projects provide a fragmented, abstracted view of the phenomena investigated, which is difficult to use in engineering decision making related to contextualised situations. This chapter shows how the actual design of engineered artefacts is research because it provides knowledge of the impact of the integration of various elements of existing knowledge, which demonstrates the properties of the designs achieved through the design work and leads to discovery of solutions to the various challenges of integration discovered through the project which attempts to achieve the integration.

Download Full-text

Norms and Social Network–Centric Behavior Change Intervention (Nam Nalavazhvu) for Improved Toilet Usage in Peri-Urban Communities of Tamil Nadu: Protocol for a Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial

JMIR Research Protocols ◽

10.2196/24407 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (5) ◽

pp. e24407

Author(s):

Sania Ashraf ◽

Cristina Bicchieri ◽

Maryann G Delea ◽

Upasak Das ◽

Kavita Chauhan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Behavior Change ◽

Low Income ◽

Tamil Nadu ◽

Controlled Trial ◽

Well Being ◽

Baseline Survey ◽

Behavior Change Intervention ◽

Behavior Change Interventions ◽

Cluster Randomized ◽

The Impact

Background Inconsistent toilet usage is a continuing challenge in India. Despite the impact of social expectations on toilet usage, few programs and studies have developed theoretically grounded norm-centric behavior change interventions to increase toilet use in low-income settings. Objective The objective of this paper is to detail the rationale and design of an ex ante, parallel cluster-randomized trial evaluating the impact of a demand-side, norm-centric behavior change intervention on exclusive toilet use and maintenance in peri-urban Tamil Nadu, India. Methods Following formative research, we developed an evidence-based norm-centric behavior change intervention called Nam Nalavazhvu (Tamil for “our well-being”). The multilevel intervention aims to improve toilet usage by shifting empirical expectations or beliefs about other relevant people’s sanitation practices. It also provides action-oriented information to aid individuals to set goals and overcome barriers to own, consistently use, and maintain their toilets. This trial includes 76 wards in the Pudukkottai and Karur districts, where half were randomly assigned to receive the intervention and the remaining served as counterfactuals. Results We enrolled wards and conducted a baseline survey among randomly selected individuals in all 76 wards. The 1-year behavior change intervention is currently ongoing. At the endline, we will collect relevant data and compare results between study arms to determine the impacts of the Nam Nalavazhvu intervention on sanitation-related behavioral, health, and well-being outcomes and potential moderators. This study is powered to detect differences in the prevalence of exclusive toilet use between study arms. We are also conducting a process evaluation to understand the extent to which the intervention was implemented as designed, given the special pandemic context. Conclusions Findings from this trial will inform norm-centric behavior change strategies to improve exclusive toilet usage. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04269824; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04269824 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/24407

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Gauging the impact of behavior change interventions: A tutorial on the Numbers Needed to Treat

10.31234/osf.io/2bau7 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Stefan L.K. Gruijters ◽

Gjalt - Jorn Ygram Peters

Keyword(s):

Behavior Change ◽

Effect Size ◽

Population Level ◽

Applied Psychology ◽

Behavior Change Intervention ◽

Behavior Change Interventions ◽

Effect Size Index ◽

Numbers Needed To Treat ◽

Explained Variance ◽

The Impact

Effect size indices are valuable to research in applied psychology, but traditional measures (e.g. Cohen’s d or Pearson’s r) are limited by their ability to convey practical information about intervention effectiveness. Researchers rely on concepts such as ‘standardized mean difference’ or ‘explained variance’ to express effectiveness. Practitioners, policymakers, and lay-people prefer concepts such as frequencies. Partial solutions have been offered by rules-of-thumb (e.g. Cohen’s categories of ‘small’, ‘moderate’ and ‘large’), but such pigeon-holing is somewhat arbitrary and of little nuance. We review, and provide a tutorial on, the Numbers Needed for Treat (NNT) statistic—an effect size index that originated in the medical literature. NNT fills the communicative gap between research and practice, and is particularly suited to gauge the impact of a behavior change intervention on a population level. NNT is defined as the number of people who need to be exposed to an intervention to achieve the desired change in one more individual, relative to a control condition. NNT has informational advantages: 1) it communicates effect magnitude in a frequency-format (number of people) making the impact of an intervention on a population transparent, and 2) it considers the population behavior base-rate to estimate this number. We adapt and extend the NNT index to suit applied psychology endeavors, and argue that the measure can strengthen the translation of intervention research to practice. The statistical procedure to estimate the NNT is explained, illustrated with concrete examples, and supplemented by script and functions to calculate the index in the R - environment.

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