A behavioral design approach to improving a Chagas disease vector control campaign in Peru

BMC Public Health

Michael Z. Levy¹  Ricardo Castillo-Neyra¹  Jere Behrman²  Alison M. Buttenheim³  Valerie A. Paz-Soldan⁴  Molly McGuire⁴  Julio Meza⁵  Katty Borrini-Mayori⁵  Cesar Naquira⁵  Amparo M. Toledo Vizcarra⁵  Lina M. Mollesaca Riveros⁵ 

[1] Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perleman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvana;Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania;Department of Family and Community Health, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing;Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine;Facultad de Salud Pública y Administración, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia;

关键词: Vector control;    Behavioral economics;    Public health;    Intervention design;    Chagas disease;    Peru;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12889-019-7525-3

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Abstract Background Individual behavior change is a critical ingredient in efforts to improve global health. Central to the focus on behavior has been a growing understanding of how the human brain makes decisions, from motivations and mindsets to unconscious biases and cognitive shortcuts. Recent work in the field of behavioral economics and related fields has contributed to a rich menu of insights and principles that can be engineered into global health programs to increase impact and reach. However, there is little research on the process of designing and testing interventions informed by behavioral insights. Methods In a study focused on increasing household participation in a Chagas disease vector control campaign in Arequipa, Peru, we applied Datta and Mullainathan’s “behavioral design” approach to formulate and test specific interventions. In this Technical Advance article we describe the behavioral design approach in detail, including the Define, Diagnosis, Design, and Test phases. We also show how the interventions designed through the behavioral design process were adapted for a pragmatic randomized controlled field trial. Results The behavioral design framework provided a systematic methodology for defining the behavior of interest, diagnosing reasons for household reluctance or refusal to participate, designing interventions to address actionable bottlenecks, and then testing those interventions in a rigorous counterfactual context. Behavioral design offered us a broader range of strategies and approaches than are typically used in vector control campaigns. Conclusions Careful attention to how behavioral design may affect internal and external validity of evaluations and the scalability of interventions is needed going forward. We recommend behavioral design as a useful complement to other intervention design and evaluation approaches in global health programs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown