LifeGuide: an infrastructure for empowering behavioural intervention research

Abstract

Behavioural interventions are packages of tailored advice and support for behaviour change, which are known as one of the most important methodologies and technologies adopted by social scientists for understanding and changing behaviour.There has been a trend for more and more behavioural intervention studies to be carried out on-line. It has been demonstrated that web-based behavioural interventions have many advantages over the traditional face-to-face method. However, at this stage in time, due to the lack of software for authoring WBBIs, their potential is severely restricted. Many commercial applications that could potentially be used for creating interventions have been shown to be inflexible for social science research. Therefore, researchers need to develop WBBI applications and analyse the data of each intervention individually. This vast duplication of effort in producing similar WBBIs, has limited the number of interventions that can be developed and evaluated, thereby limiting the accumulation of knowledge behavioural intervention research. LifeGuide is a social science research environment co-designed by both computer scientists and behavioural psychologists for accelerating WBBI research. The system is aimed at enabling social scientists with minimal technical expertise to design, develop and deploy a WBBI by themselves. The intervention and its results can be shared or reused within the research community to devise evolving interventions. The data for each intervention can be potentially integrated to carry out large scale data analysis to answer further research questions.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

ORCID for David De Roure: orcid.org/0000-0001-9074-3016

ORCID for Lucy Yardley: orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-883X

Catalogue record

Export record