As I sit in the back of the classroom, looking out the nearly floor to ceiling windows onto the zen garden maze below, I’m struck once again by the difficulty of explaining the mechanisms of communication. I admit, when I started graduate school, I had absolutely no idea communication was: A) such a massive academic field; B) had so many sub-fields and foci; and C) was so damn difficult! Even now, Ph.D. long in hand and numerous years of teaching under my belt, I’m still consistently struck by the complexity of communication; the level of nuance, thought, care, and evidence-based theory our academic field requires. Many, including my previous self, think ‘meh. I want to change people’s behavior about something so I’ll just tell them they should change it and that will work.’ Oh no my friends, oh… no….
Changing people’s behaviors is one of the hardest goals to accomplish. Think about how often we all engage in behaviors we know aren’t good for us: drinking, smoking, driving poorly, screaming with rage at our significant others, etc. We all know we shouldn’t do these things, but we do them anyway – habits, environment, contexts, and so much more impact our actions. It’s hard to change. It’s even harder to craft a message that actually gets people to change.
Enter SBCC
Social and Behavioral Change Communication stems from a foundation of using communication to improve human rights. It is dialogue driven, meaning participants, senders and receivers of messages, researchers, and the community engage in deep dialogue in order to create SBCC. We engage in deep practice – spending a lot of time understanding the contexts of people’s lives that lead them to an unhealthy behavior; in the case of My Zambia, My Responsibility, this behavior is alcohol/drug addiction in youth (those under 35 in Zambia). In order to do this, we can think of two models: the socio-ecological model (SEM) or the behavior driven model (BDM). Both are based on diving into the drivers, behaviors, environmental, relational factors that lead to behaviors so that we can use those aspects to lead to change. In order to do this, we have various processes that center on understanding, designing, creating, implementing/monitoring, and analyzing SBCC. Process here is an important word: it indicates step-by-step movement that is careful and consistent.
Building a Theory of Change
The way that we apply SBCC principles to change behavior is by building a theory of change — or ToC for short. A ToC is a backwards working model, meaning we start with the goal, which is our changed behavior, and work backwards all the way to the project activities, which are the specific communication interventions we’re making. A full ToC is: goals <– action <– affect <– project activities. We can’t start with the project activities if we don’t understand the affect, or the ways in which people emotionally and mentally feel about the goal and the project activity. In order to understand the action people will take to get to the goal, we have to understand the emotional/mental component (affect). And finally, to get to the goal, we have to understand how people will/won’t take a certain action. Easy, right?! Nnnnoooppeee!!
For an quick example, let’s say your goal is to get people to recycle their plastic bottles every time they leave a classroom. The next question would be to understand the action we want people to take, which would be to carry the bottle from their desk to the recycling bin and place it in there. The affect would be how people feel about recycling, whether they think it’s a worthy task and goal. The project activities would be the ways in which we can get people to the goal, so placing recycling bins right by the door on the way out, or offering extra credit for recycling cans, etc. But, you’re probably asking yourself, how do we even understand the action and affect (which of course impact the project activities and the goals)? Aha! That’s a matter of understanding the barriers to, and motivators and drivers of behavior change. Tune in to the next post to keep learning about ToC, SBCC, and MZMR.
More soon!
Ailesha
