Prevention practice is falling through the gap between interpersonal and systems-wide change — Behaviour-in-Systems provides a solution

Written by Dr. Paul Chadwick, and Kelsey Paske.

Prevention has established tools for changing people and tools for changing systems. What the field lacks is a way to connect them.  Behaviour-in-Systems offers a way to integrate different layers of the socio-ecological model of psychologically harmful behaviour within organisations, uncover the causal relationships that keep problematic behaviour in place, and design a comprehensive prevention strategy that is targeted, coordinated and sustainable.

In the context of interpersonal harm, prevention work means taking action across the spectrum of primary prevention, early intervention and response — working within organisations and communities to prevent gendered violence, psychosocial hazards and discrimination. Yet prevention practitioners increasingly find themselves pulled to work at both ends of the problem at once: with individuals and relationships on one side, and with systems, norms and institutions on the other. Many do both. But these two approaches often proceed on separate tracks, without a theoretically and methodologically coherent approach to bring them together. 

Prevention practice, as a result, keeps falling through the gap between individually focused behaviour change efforts and those that bring about systems-wide change.

What each approach contributes — and where each stops

Both approaches make a valuable contribution to prevention. 

•   Behaviour-change approaches are strong at the interpersonal end. They ask what a person does, and why. But on their own, they tend to treat behaviour as though it lives inside the person — knowledge, skill, attitude — and miss how the broader context shapes its expression. 

•   Systems approaches are strong at the structural end. They map the actors, structures and feedback loops that set the conditions for the expression of harmful behaviour.  But on their own, they can often lack the detail - the precise who, what, when, where and why - needed to fully understand the behaviour. 

What is needed is a way to understand the web of causal relationships by which macro-level structural influences create the conditions that facilitate the expression of a range of behaviours that contribute to the expression and maintenance of harmful behaviours, and how those behaviours themselves create feedback loops that maintain those structural influences, or act to mitigate the impact of attempts to bring about change.

Minding the Gap

An effective approach to prevention requires closing two gaps left between existing behaviour and systems approaches: The gap between layers of the socio-ecological model. The framework underpinning Australian prevention runs from the individual and relationship level, through organisations and communities, to systems, institutions and the broader society (Our Watch;Change the Story). Interpersonal change and systems-wide change are each well developed. Although the contributions to violence are well defined within each layer of the social-ecological model, the links between the layers are less defined and understood. What is often missing is an articulation of the causal thread that connects the political, economic, community, interpersonal and individual influences on violence. 

•   The gap along the prevention continuum. While prevention work spans primary prevention, early intervention, response and recovery (Safe and Equal), resources and research cluster at the upstream (primary prevention) and downstream (response) ends. Early intervention — the space where emerging harm could be interrupted before it escalates — is repeatedly identified as the underdeveloped middle, arecognised key gap in the system.

Having worked across this spectrum for a number of years, we’ve noticed that this disconnect between behavioural and systems approaches is felt most sharply exactly where the field already invests least — the early-intervention middle. 

What Behaviour-in-Systems is and does

Behaviour-in-systems (BiS) is an evolving methodology to help bridge this gap. It couples two things the field usually keeps apart: systems mapping — the actors, behaviours and feedback loops across every level of the socio-ecological model — with the COM-B model, which holds that any behaviour requires capability, opportunity and motivation, together (Michie, van Stralen & West, 2011, Michie, Atkins & West, 2014). BiS offers prevention practice a new way of designing and implementing programs.

•   It describes the causal chains that span different layers of the socio-ecological model so that practitioners can see exactly how structural inequalities and power operate through organisational and community structures to shape behaviour at the level of interpersonal relationships. This description can help reflect actual, rather than assumed, opportunities, tensions and intended or unintended consequences of the current state.

•   It offers the opportunity to generate new, targeted interventions. Because the approach reveals the causal structure, you can find precise leverage points and design interventions matched to them, delivering behavioural and systems change together rather than one at the expense of the other. It allows you to design downstream interventions that are likely to change behaviour whilst simultaneously reshaping the upstream conditions that enable such interventions to be implemented in ways that will deliver their desired effect. 

Enhancing prevention practice

None of this replaces behavioural or systems approaches. It connects them, reveals the causal relationships between them, and gives practitioners a way to design a suite of co-ordinated interventions across the whole socio-ecological model. BiS offers a different way of thinking at a time when prevention practice is critical, but knowledge, resourcing, and sustainability are being stretched.

Prevention practice has been falling through the gap between interpersonal and systems-wide change. Behaviour-in-Systems is a way to close it — and to strengthen the practice on either side.

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