Intervention Development for Health Behavior Change: Integrating Evidence and the Perspectives of Users and Stakeholders

Intervention development is an iterative, recursive process, and involvement of users and stakeholders is of upmost importance to produce interventions that are likely to be acceptable and effective. Health behavior change interventions can be developed using several frameworks. Although different, these focus on the same core set of steps: analyzing the behavioral issue and developing an intervention objective, causal modeling, defining intervention features, developing a logic model of change, developing materials and interface, empirical optimization, outcome and process evaluation and, if successful, implementation. This chapter summarizes these steps highlighting how users and stakeholders can be involved with practical examples.