ABSTRACT
The Toronto Charter and its companion document, the seven investments that work (see Chapter 1), have provided strong evidence that changing people’s physical activity and sedentary behaviour could have a major impact on their physical and mental well-being. In particular, the seven investments show very clearly the areas in which we would be best to invest our eorts in trying to change physical activity (see Table 12.1). However, physical activity behaviours in any of these seven areas have shown themselves to be dicult to change, particularly in the long term. Many studies have used cross-sectional designs to highlight potential inuences on behaviour (see Chapter 7), but these cannot establish causal links and are only a small step in building evidence for actual behaviour change. Intervention research that attempts to manipulate correlates to facilitate behaviour change oers much stronger evidence and is critical to the continued development of the eld. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to highlight key issues in the design and evaluation of physical activity behaviour change interventions, including the following:
● frameworks for intervention design and evaluation; ● the importance of theory; ● behaviour change techniques; ● mediation analysis; ● the importance of process evaluation.
