Using a team science approach to improve systematic reviews of behaviour change techniques

The award

In November 2025, team BEST BEHAVIOUR, which includes members of the Manchester Centre for Health Psychology, embarked on an 18-month endeavour funded by an NIHR Team Science Award. This award offers researchers the unique opportunity to build and train a team and undertake preliminary work to prepare for a competitive research funding application.

The team

The team consists of Jeremy Dearling (Public contributor), Rebecca Goulding (Health services and qualitative researcher), Sarah Rhodes (Statistician and systematic reviewer), Tracy Epton (Behaviour change expert and systematic reviewer) and Ukay Abaraogu (Physiotherapist and systematic reviewer). We bring together a diverse range of skills and experiences and aim to use these to train and mentor each other and use our combined skills to tackle a complex problem.

The Team Science approach encourages us to think differently about the way we work and organise our team. Our aims are shared leadership, task-based meetings and equitable decision making. The lack of hierarchy and lines of open communication leads to challenges, lively debate and sticky moments, but ultimately, we are moving forward and building new and positive ways of working.

The problem

Our team was united with a shared appreciation of how messy and frustrating it can be to do a systematic review of behaviour change interventions. Several of the team have done them, and every time we set out with grand intentions of using them to identify the components of interventions that drive behaviour change. Many hours have been spent using the behaviour change technique (BCT) taxonomy to code the active ingredients of behaviour change interventions. Many hours have been spent debating how to deal with comparison arms, fidelity to the BCTs and the plethora of BCTs involved.

Ultimately, we have ended up with bland conclusions which tell us that behaviour change interventions work on average, but little idea about which bits are necessary and which bits aren’t, and a sneaking suspicion that we probably spent longer than we needed to on the process. Ultimately, we want to produce guidance to help reviewers conduct systematic reviews of behaviour change techniques that are as efficient, accurate and meaningful to stakeholders as possible.

Our Scoping Review

While we can’t use our NIHR Team Science funding for ‘research’ as such, we are allowed to conduct a scoping review to help us plan the next stage and this is one of the things we are working on now. We are bringing together published systematic reviews on the effectiveness of behaviour change techniques within health and health-related behaviour change interventions. We are extracting information about the different review aims, the methods that researchers have used, the challenges they have faced and the strategies they have employed to overcome them.

We hope to have some preliminary results by Autumn 2026 and be able to use our findings to start shaping potential recommendations to use in guidance.

Outreach

We are talking to stakeholders, from a variety of backgrounds, about what they would like to see in any guidance on systematic reviews about behaviour change interventions. We have recruited a diverse group of public contributors and will be talking to them on three separate occasions during the project to find out what information they want to see included in reviews of behaviour change techniques, how best to present that information and how they would like to be involved going forwards.

We have already met with researchers via The University of Manchester Behaviour Change Group and the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine Conference. They have given us interesting insights into the questions they want answering and have shaped our scoping review with ideas about what to include.

We have plans to talk to healthcare professionals via a series of similar events.

We are also looking forward to running a round table discussion at the European Health Psychology conference in Paphos, Cyprus, later this year.

Collaborations with Paulina Schenk from the University College London Centre for Behaviour Change and Jenny McSharry at the Behaviour Change Research Group in Galway have helped form our plans so far and will continue to do so.

What’s next?

Our goal is to obtain further funding to enable us to carry out consensus activity, guidance writing and dissemination to turn our dreams for guidance on conduct and reporting of systematic reviews of behaviour change techniques into a reality.

We’d also love to be able to create tools to help operationalise the guidance including statistical software and meaningful visual summaries.

Additionally, we hope to be able to share what we have learnt about the Team Science way of working with others.

How to get in touch

If you’d like to hear more about our project as it progresses and opportunities to contribute, please sign up to our mailing list.

You can also follow our Linkedin page.

Relevant article

Rhodes, S., & Abaraogu, U. (2025). Navigating the complexity: a comment on difficulties in conducting systematic reviews to evaluate the effectiveness of behaviour change interventions. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

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