Measure twice, cut once
Introducing a repository of behavioral science measures.
If you want to change something, you need to have a way of knowing whether that thing is changed. That requires a yardstick with which to compare the things that were altered to the things that were not.
The things that behavioral scientists want to measure – from the behaviors themselves to the psychological and contextual processes that influence behaviors – are fuzzy, somewhat ephemeral. Humans are complicated, making it hard to know what measures do the job well of assessing the processes behavioral scientists are interested in.
The Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) Measure Repository is designed to solve this problem. This repository is part of the larger Science of Behavior Change project, which aims to facilitate an approach to behavioral science that is focused on the “mechanisms” behind behavior change – many of which are psychological and contextual. The measures of these mechanisms, as well as the measures of the behaviors themselves, are deposited on the repository. The repository makes it easy to find good measures of these behaviors and mechanisms. In doing so, it also encourages users to think critically about why and how the interventions that they’re using might exert their effects – in other words, these same psychological and contextual mechanisms.
Let’s say you were doing a study of how unconditional transfers of cash affects people’s willingness to take risks. Perhaps you think that having more money allows people the freedom and ability to innovate because the extra money provides a buffer in case their innovation doesn’t work out.
You could type “risk” into the search bar and immediately be met with a swathe of measures relating to risk, along with the information to assess whether they are relevant to the project you have in mind. On each measure you will also see an extensive selection of filters to help narrow down the characteristics of the measures that you need.
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Let’s say that you select the Angling Risk Task, a measure of risk preferences that assesses risk preferences by putting participants through a simulated fishing game. If you click on that measure, you’ll see a short description of the task, along with a link to an article via Google Scholar that describes the development and properties of the measure, and a link to download the code associated with that measure.
For the Angling Risk Task in particular, the page also contains one of our integrations into the repository, a link to test-drive the measure yourself on the Experiment Factory, a platform for hosting behavioral science measures online. This allows you as the user to get a sense of what it’s like to be a participant yourself, giving you a feel for how the measure works.
If we had instead clicked on the Brief Risk-Resilience Index for Screening, we would have seen another integration – a link to the Theory and Techniques Tool, which provides a list of potential techniques to change this measure, along with some possible psychological mechanisms through which these techniques might transmit their influence.
The SOBC Measure Repository is a rich source of information that you can use to find behavioral science measures that are appropriate to your project. It also encourages its users to think about why and how the interventions they’re considering might exert their effects.
This will, hopefully, make behavioral science research and programs – including yours – more efficient, more rigorous, and more robust.
To find our more about this repository and our work in Culture, Research Ethics and Methods (CREME), send me an email at Patrick.Forscher@busaracenter.org