Thursday, May 19 – Conference Opening Activities

Friday, May 20 – Scientific Plenary Day

Saturday, May 21 – Interactive Workshop Day

Workshop Sessions

All workshops are offered as half-day sessions (morning and afternoon schedules to be announced). Fluid breaks between 10am and 11am, and between 3pm and 4pm.

Generating and Translating Behavioural Evidence in the Time of COVID-19

• Format: Virtual
• Co-Leads: Susan Michie, PhD (UK) and Molly Byrne, PhD (Ireland)
• Time: Morning (9-11am)

Responding well to a pandemic requires rapid access to good evidence from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including epidemiology, modelling, virology, medicine, public health and the behavioural and social sciences. It also requires effective translation of that evidence into policy and practice.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, behavioural scientists have contributed significantly to national and international response efforts. This contribution requires development and execution of key skills in generating and translating evidence, including conducting primary research within tight timeframes to address gaps, evidence synthesis, production of policy briefs and evidence summaries, engagement with government agencies and communication to public audiences.

The aim of this workshop is to allow participants explore and develop their understanding and skills in generating and translating behavioural evidence into policy, using the example of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The facilitators will share their experience as behavioural scientists who are contributing to the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic in their respective countries. They will draw out key learnings from these experiences, highlighting strengths and weaknesses in the current response. They will also highlight a number of key skills, including presentation of research in a useable format, engaging with government agencies and working with the media to promote public dissemination of key messages. The facilitators will guide a number of structured discussions and activities in which workshop participants can develop their thinking, ideas and skills in these areas.

On completion of the workshop, participants will have a greater understanding of knowledge generation and translation for societal impact. They will also have developed a number of key skills to increase their effectiveness as knowledge translation agents in behavioural science.

Experiment in a Box (XB) – a new paradigm for designing digital interventions

• Format: Virtual
• Lead: m.c. schraefel, PhD (UK)
• Time: Morning (9am-12pm)

If you are interested in design interactive health technology to help people build their own actionable health knowledge skills and practice so they can thrive across contexts – without that technology – this workshop is for you.

Participants will leave this workshop with tools they can immediately use for their own research, including

1. How to design an XB, an evaluated experimental approach that supports participants
   • making choices about possible strategies for health practices
   • enabling them to try these out without committing to them
   • assessing efficacy
2. Nine fundamental areas of non invasive interaction around which we can successfully, readily build xb’s for self-health
3. The Inbodied Interaction Design Framework – a cheat sheet/template to make healthful interactive tech and its lifecycle clear to consider, imagine and prioritise including design choice paradigms of
   • continua like outsourcing to insourcing, habit to heuristic, raw to cyborg among others
   • tuning as a model for exploring evaluating success around knowledge skills and practice development
   • cycles of engagement with any such tool
4. A Challenge question: how move from thinking about individuals, to individuals building groups?
5. BONUS OPPORTUNITY – your own work co-developed via these approaches before you leave.

This online workshop has three sections of 45 mins each with 10-15 minute breaks between sections

Part 1: the Inbodied Interaction model underpinning the XB approach

Part 2: the XB methodology itself with examples of designs

Part 3: the inbodied interaction design frawework – and a worked problem example

It would be great for the last session to have some examples of interest to you to work through. If you’re interested in attending, you’re welcome to email me (m.c.) a quick description of a health skill you’d like to support building (notice I didn’t say “habit”), and how you’re thinking of approaching that design, and we can work through some of these together.

Considerations in resource-constrained contexts when designing interventions

• Format: In Person
• Co-Leads: Ashraf Kagee, PhD (South Africa), Jo Hart, PhD (UK), Rizwana Roomaney, PhD (South Africa), and Lucie Byrne-Davis, PhD (UK)
• Time: Morning (9am-12pm)

Health interventions can contribute significantly to realising the goal of sustainable development. The Strategic Development Goal of ensuring healthy lives and well-being for all, at all ages, pertains to all health conditions. Considering the low ratio of researchers to the population of many low and middle income countries (LMICs), there is a specific need to build capacity for research so as to ensure good quality data so that social policies can be data-informed.

This workshop calls attention to key considerations for trial investigators assessing the effectiveness of physical and mental health interventions in LMICs. These include culture, stigma associated with specific conditions such as mental health and HIV care, structural factors, power differentials between investigator and participants, and the assumptions of measures and theories developed in western contexts.

We will begin with a description of the workshop objectives. We will then describe the workshop themes and assign participants to groups. Groups will be asked to discuss a specific theme, namely, culture, stigma, structural factors, power differentials, and Western measures and theories. The plenary session will be a report back from each small group, followed by discussion of key points raised. We will then ask participants to reflect on the discussion when designing a behavioural intervention. We will conclude with a summary and a way forward.

MOST designs for behavioural research

• Format: In Person
• Lead: Kate Guastaferro, PhD (US)
• Time: Afternoon (1-4pm)

There has been a call for optimizing multicomponent interventions in recent years. One framework for doing this is the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST), an innovative, engineering-inspired framework which emphasizes careful management of research resources and ongoing improvement of a product. The goal of MOST is to empirically identify an intervention that strategically balances effectiveness with affordability, scalability, and efficiency via an optimization trial, a highly rigorous experiment.

This workshop will provide a general introduction to MOST, with a specific focus on how we might apply MOST to address the translational science pipeline from intervention design through dissemination and implementation. We will use the three phases of MOST to frame the substantive elements of the workshop and do individual activities to reinforce skills taught. In the preparation phase of MOST, we will discuss how to create a good conceptual model, how to use the conceptual model effectively throughout grant proposals, and reasons for publishing a conceptual model. Attendees will be encouraged to design their own conceptual model and discuss with a small group. In the optimization phase, we will discuss the importance of selecting the right experimental design, with a focus on the factorial experiment. In this section, we will demonstrate practical tools for randomization and management of experimental conditions, analysis of factorial data, and demonstrate decision-making with artificial data. Finally, we will discuss the evaluation phase and considerations for trial design. Ample time will be allotted for open discussion and individualized feedback.

Say G’day to behavioural implementation science methods

• Format: In Person
• Co-Leads: Jill Francis, PhD (Australia), Jeremy Grimshaw, PhD (Canada), Andrea Patey, PhD (Canada), and Guillaume Fontaine, PhD (Canada)
• Time: Afternoon (1-4pm)

You have developed and evaluated a behaviour change intervention that you want healthcare professionals to deliver. These activities have been well received and the paper even has several early citations. But healthcare professionals are not using this intervention. Crikey! What next?

Just as clinical researchers test the effectiveness of clinical interventions, so implementation researchers test whether implementation interventions are effective in supporting practice change, with a view to enhancing health outcomes. Implementation science, an interdisciplinary field that draws heavily from the behavioural sciences, investigates and addresses care gaps to supporting behaviour change among healthcare professionals. Healthcare professional behaviours are determined by a complex array of factors and are often highly routinised and time constrained. This interactive workshop will explore processes, methods and techniques from behavioural sciences that can be utilized to design and evaluate interventions to support clinical practice change. The workshop will be split into three sections. First, attendees will have the opportunity to use a tool (AACTT) to define who are the people (Actors) who need to do something differently to deliver your intervention consistently to the people who need it. Second, attendees will use an established framework grounded in the behavioural sciences (Theoretical Domains Framework) to investigate what barriers those Actors face in their context. Finally, techniques that might address these barriers and methods for operationalizing these techniques in ways that are feasible in the context will be discussed. The workshop will change the assumptions you might have about getting effective interventions into everyday practice – fair dinkum!

Introduction to the ORBIT model for intervention development

• Format: Hybrid
• Co-Leads: Lynda Powell, PhD (USA), Kenneth Freedland, PhD (USA), and Susan Czajkowski, PhD (USA)
• Time: Afternoon (1-4pm)

This workshop will provide investigators who are interested in the design and preliminary testing of health-related behavioral interventions an opportunity to (1) learn about the ORBIT model, a framework for developing, refining and testing behavioral treatments for chronic diseases (see reference); (2) identify the defining features and appropriate study designs and methods for each phase of the framework; and (3) apply knowledge about relevant designs, methodologies and funding opportunities for early-phase behavioral intervention research to their own behavioral treatment development projects.

The speakers will present an overview of the ORBIT model and its phases, addressing important topics such as the concept of clinical significance and the role of stakeholder engagement in the early phases of behavioral intervention development. Detailed information will be provided about key features, questions, objectives, and methodologies most applicable to the early phases of behavioral intervention development, and examples will be provided to illustrate the unique features of each phase of the ORBIT model. These presentations will be followed by a panel discussion aimed at providing advice on obtaining funding and publishing research using the model. The presenters will describe their own experiences in designing behavioral intervention development studies, bringing these “lessons learned” to bear in providing guidance to course attendees to help them design their own behavioral intervention development projects. The speakers will walk participants through specific examples of successful grant applications and publications that have used the ORBIT model and provide advice and tips for maximizing success in research proposals and publications that are based on this model. Ample time will be devoted to addressing questions attendees have regarding the ORBIT model, the process of behavioral intervention development, and their own intervention development and testing research.

Learning Objective 1: Upon completion, participant will be able to understand the goals and objectives of the ORBIT model and to identify the unique features, key questions, and appropriate study designs and methods for each phase of the ORBIT model.

Learning Objective 2: Upon completion, participant will be able to apply information on the ORBIT model to their own intervention development research.

Communication motivationnelle: l’art de mener une consultation plus fructueuse

• Format: Virtual
• Co-Leads: Anda Dragomir, PhD (Canada) and Brigitte Voisard, PhD(c) (Canada)
• Time: Morning (9am-12pm)

Cet atelier présente comment utiliser la communication motivationnelle (CM) dans le but de faciliter l’engagement de patients dans un changement d’habitudes de vie à long terme. Cela inclut de décrire le rôle et l’importance d’une communication collaborative entre professionnels de la santé et patients, d’identifier les pièges communicationnels les plus courants, et de pratiquer l’application des compétences de la CM par le biais d’activités interactives.