Developing intervention papers
Developing and testing a self affirmation intervention
2009
This paper describes the development of a self affirmation intervention.
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The intervention is a questionnaire about people's character strengths where they complete scales about how much various character strengths describe them.
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It also tests a variety of control interventions e.g., completing the same questionnaire about David Beckham.
Does situation-specificity affect the operation of implementation intentions?
2017
This paper tested the effectiveness of a tool for delivering implementation intentions called a volitional help sheet. This is a list of critical situations when you might be tempted not to perform the behaviour and a list of solutions to help you with the behaviour. The implementation intention is made when you draw a line between situations (e.g., "If I'm tempted to not be physically active because it is cold outside") that are relevant to you and appropriate solutions (e.g., "then I will exercise indoors").
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The study compared a standard volitional help sheet (several situations and several solutions), a single situation volitional help sheet (one generic situation, i.e., "If I'm tempted not to be physically active...", and several solutions) and a control condition (a list of situations and solutions but the participants are not asked to link them).
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We found that people who completed either of the volitional help sheets reported higher level of physical activity than those people in the control condition.
Development of theory based health messages: Three phase programme of formative research
2015
In this study we tried to change the health behaviours of students by intervening just before they start university.
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Half of the students were given access to a web based intervention and half were not given access (control group). The intervention aimed to change binge drinking, inadequate fruit and vegetable intake, inadequate physical activity and cigarette smoking.
The intervention tried to make students more accepting of health risk information (i.e., self affirmation intervention), persuaded them of the health risks (i.e., health messages based on the theory of planned behaviour) and helped them plan to change their intentions into actual behaviour (i.e., implementation intentions).
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We found that after 1 and 6 month follow up there were no differences between the two groups.