It's About Time: Answering the Call for Greater Precision in Research and Practice

Abstract

The conviction that evidence-based practice will afford progress in global efforts to modify the behaviours that underlie current rates of morbidity and premature mortality rests on the development of an evidence base that can inform the design and evaluation of intervention practices . Yet, despite an ever-growing research literature, there is lingering frustration with what can be gleaned from the evidence available. In response to this state of affairs, there have been calls to improve the connections between theory and interventions (Hekler et al., 2016;Rothman, 2004), initiatives have emerged that delineate how to translate basic principles into intervention strategies (Czajkowski et al., 2015;Nielsen, Riddle, & King, 2018;Sheeran, Klein, & Rothman, 2017), resources have been developed to help investigators specify the intervention techniques being utilised and how they might work (Carey et al., in press; Michie et al., 2013), and guidance is available, within domains, regarding what constructs to measure and how best to measure them (e.g. weight loss; MacLean et al., 2018).Although these efforts have considerable promise, collectively they rest on our understanding of the relation between people's psychological experience and their behaviour and, thus, depend on the quality of the principles that can be derived from current theoretical models of health behaviour. In her paper, "It's time to think about time in health psychology", Urte Scholz (2019), compellingly argues that current models have failed to engage sufficiently with the time course of the relations they describe. The principles that can be derived from these models offer limited guidance regarding their temporal parameters; yet the prevailing focus of most research in health psychology is on delineating -and then attempting to leverage-the interplay between constructs over time (e.g. the relation between perceptions of personal risk and precautionary behaviour;Weinstein, 2007). Even with a growing focus on efforts to promote bs_bs_banner sustained changes in behaviour and the observation that the determinants of behaviour may shift over time, theorising regarding the time course of these phenomena remains remarkably underdeveloped (Kwasnicka, Dombrowski, White, & Sniehotta, 2016;Rothman, Baldwin, Hertel, & Fuglestad, 2011). Thus, there is a disconnect between what investigators are trying to accomplish and the theoretical principles they rely on to guide those efforts (Dunton, 2018).With this call to action, Scholz (2019) illustrates not only the paucity of current theorising regarding temporal factors, but also how engaging with temporal factors should enrich the practical value of our theories and, thus, the impact they can have on practice. It is hard to imagine that readers will respond anyway but favourably to this call, embracing the importance of time, but what can be done to ensure that this favourable response, in fact, leads to action? As the intention-behaviour gap is not solely the province of individuals struggling to manage their...

Theory Integration for Lifestyle Behavior Change in the Digital Age: An Adaptive Decision-Making Framework

“…Other theories, such as the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) [31], consider more rapid interactions between behavior and behavior determinants (eg, self-efficacy); however, the dynamic interaction is theorized only at a very abstract conceptual level without explicitly modeling the role of time or how the interaction works [32]. Both criticisms also coincide with the recent advocates of paying more attention to temporal aspects in health psychology to improve theories and their translation into practice [32,33].…”

Behavioral Framework of Immersive Technologies (BehaveFIT): How and Why Virtual Reality can Support Behavioral Change Processes

“…Byrne (2020) roughly groups such moderators into three categories: temporal intervention context, mode of delivery, and individual characteristics. Inspired by a commentary by Scholz (2019), the temporal context of an intervention has been addressed by several researchers (e.g., Bolger and Zee, 2019;Rothman, 2019) in recent years. Discussions include, among others, the time of day, the time of year or time within the process of behavior change that the intervention is applied, or the cycle of repetitions.…”

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Social cognitions and smoking behaviour: Temporal resolution matters

“…Indeed, Turan et al (2016) make the point that measuring cognitions and behaviours via temporally distal questionnaires would require participants to remember or take a mental average of their thoughts and behaviours during the period in question which is a different mental process than what would be required to report cognitions during either a daily-diary study or a study using momentary assessment. However, as this remains an underresearched area, little is known about the conceptual equivalence of measurements taken at different assessment schedules and temporal resolution tends not to be considered in study design (Rothman, 2019;Scholz, 2019;Sch€ uz, 2019). However, as this remains an underresearched area, little is known about the conceptual equivalence of measurements taken at different assessment schedules and temporal resolution tends not to be considered in study design (Rothman, 2019;Scholz, 2019;Sch€ uz, 2019).…”

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