Glossary
Intervention functions
What are intervention functions?
Intervention functions are broad purposes served by an intervention in the Behaviour Change Wheel: education, persuasion, incentivisation, coercion, training, restriction, environmental restructuring, modelling, and enablement.
The nine intervention functions
The definitions below follow the original BCW table; the examples illustrate how each category can be used.
- Education: build knowledge or understanding, such as explaining the nutritional content of foods.
- Persuasion: use communication to influence feelings or prompt action, such as a campaign that makes physical activity appealing.
- Incentivisation: create an expectation of reward, such as entry into a prize draw for attempting to quit smoking.
- Coercion: create an expectation of a cost or penalty, such as increasing the price paid for alcohol.
- Training: develop skills, such as supervised practice in safer driving.
- Restriction: use rules to limit opportunities for a behavior, such as an age restriction on solvent sales.
- Environmental restructuring: alter the physical or social setting, such as putting a smoking-status reminder on a clinician’s screen.
- Modelling: provide behavior to copy or aspire to, such as a fictional character demonstrating safer-sex practices.
- Enablement: provide means or remove barriers to capability or opportunity beyond education, training, and environmental restructuring, such as a prosthesis that makes physical activity possible.
Intervention functions and COM-B
One intervention can serve several functions. A function is not the same as a verified psychological mechanism, a particular technique, or the policy used to deliver it. The framework maps these functions to possible capability, opportunity, and motivation targets. The relationships are many-to-many: a function can address several COM-B components, and a component can be approached through several functions. Designers first identify the relevant barrier, then consider which functions fit it.
Example of overlapping intervention functions
A training course may provide information and develop skills, so it can serve both education and training functions. Whether it improves the target behavior requires evaluation.
Why the categories matter
The original Behaviour Change Wheel paper sets out the categories and their relationships. The list prompts a designer to consider options beyond providing information. Its empirical checks examined reliable classification, not whether every proposed function improves behavior in every setting.