McFadden A., Fox-Rushby J. Green J, Williams V, Pokhrel S, McLeish J,
McCormick F,. Anokye N, Dritsaki M, McCarthy R., Bennett S., Entwistle F.,
Renfrew MJ.
Behaviour Change Research Cycle (BCRC) – Pokhrel (2012) Behaviour change research (BCR) is increasingly getting popular among academics and policymakers. Behaviour change researchers come from various disciplines- psychology, economics, neurosciences, anthropology, etc. In fact, the whole concept of behaviour change is so complex that in order to produce meaningful research outcomes, we do need more than one disciplinary contribution. Inter-disciplinary research may imply borrowing concepts and methods from one discipline and adapt those to the other. Behavioural economics, for instance, is a good example where concepts and methods from disciplines other than economics (e.g. psychology) are widely accepted, although behavioural economics has emerged as a discipline on its own right. However, such an interdisciplinary approach inevitably expands the field of behaviour change research, as complexities in understanding behaviour change can now be handled with many more tools than those that would be available to a single discipline. The Behaviour Change Research Cycle (BCRC) depicts how different questions that can arise at different stages can form behaviour change research agenda. Any policy on behaviour change cannot rely solely on measures in which individuals are held account of their own (bad or less-optimal) behaviour. Most often, where behaviour change at the population level is a socially desirable outcome, this cannot happen without some form of support (interventions), as research has established clear synergies between behaviour change and other requisites such as capability, motivation and opportunities. This extends BCR from merely an enquiry aimed at understanding individuals’ behaviour to a more pragmatic endeavour to include research informing the development of such interventions. This cycle cannot be complete without the need to evaluate whether such interventions actually work and if they do, at what cost, and whether that is efficient use of societal resources.
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Pokhrel’s work, mostly inter-disciplinary and collaborative in nature, on various stages of BCRC, as applied in health and quality of life: some examples
Understanding behaviour McFadden A., Fox-Rushby J. Green J, Williams V, Pokhrel S, McLeish J, McCormick F, Anokye N, Dritsaki M, McCarthy R., Bennett S., Entwistle F., Renfrew MJ. Understanding the use of vouchers and vitamins: Final report, Department of Health, May 2013 Pokhrel, S., & Sauerborn, R. (2004). Household decision-making on child health care in developing countries: The case of Nepal. Health Policy and Planning, 19(4), 218-233. Anokye, N. K., Pokhrel, S., Buxton, M., & Fox-Rushby, J. (2012). The demand for sports and exercise: results from an illustrative survey.. Eur J Health Econ, 13(3), 277-287. Hidayat, B., & Pokhrel, S. (2010). The selection of an appropriate count data model for modelling health insurance and health care demand: Case of Indonesia. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(1), 9-27.
Understanding differential outcomes given behaviour Vogl, M., Wenig, C. M., Leidl, R., & Pokhrel, S. (2012). Smoking and health-related quality of life in English general population: Implications for economic evaluations. BMC Public Health, 12. Pokhrel, S., De Allegri, M., Gbangou, A., & Sauerborn, R. (2010). Illness reporting and demand for medical care in rural Burkina Faso. Social Science and Medicine, 70(11), 16931700. Su, T. T., Pokhrel, S., Gbangou, A., & Flessa, S. (2006). Determinants of household health expenditure on western institutional health care. European Journal of Health Economics, 7(3), 195-203.
Development of behaviour change interventions Trapero-Bertran, M., POKHREL, S., & Trueman, P (2011). Building the Business Case for Tobacco Control: a toolkit to estimate economic impact of tobacco. 2011.. Brunel University. De Allegri, M., Pokhrel, S., Becher, H., Dong, H., Mansmann, U., Kouyaté, B., . . . Sauerborn, R. (2008). Step-wedge cluster-randomised community-based trials: an application to the study of the impact of community health insurance.. Health Research Policy and Systems, 6, 10. De Allegri, M., Kouyaté, B., Becher, H., Gbangou, A., Pokhrel, S., Sanon, M., . . . Sauerborn, R. (2006). Understanding enrolment in community health insurance in sub-Saharan Africa: Population-based case-control study in rural Burkina Faso. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 84(11), 852-858.
Evaluation of behaviour change interventions Gnawali, D. P., Pokhrel, S., Sié, A., Sanon, M., De Allegri, M., Souares, A., . . . Sauerborn, R. (2009). The effect of community-based health insurance on the utilization of modern health care services: Evidence from Burkina Faso. Health Policy, 90(2-3), 214-222. Renfrew, M. J., POKHREL, S., Quigley, M., McCormick, F., Fox-Rushby, J., Dodds, R., Williams, A. (2012). Preventing disease and saving resources: the potential contribution of increasing breastfeeding rates in the UK. UNICEF. POKHREL, S., Owen, L., Lester-George, A., Coyle, K., Coyle, D., & Trapero-Bertran, K. Tobacco Control Return on Investment Tool. (2012). NICE.
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