Behaviour and Practice Research Group

The Behaviour and Practice Research Group works across a range of domains including energy consumption, active lifestyles, response to flood risk and the self-management of medical conditions such as diabetes. The group has five key objectives:

1. To gain  interdisciplinary insights into the factors that shape behaviour and practice
2. To develop and evaluate new interventions that employ these insights
3. To investigate and develop the use of digital technologies in interventions
4. To challenge and extend the approaches that we develop by transferring insights across domain boundaries
5. To produce research that is of value to academics, policy-makers, behaviour change practitioners and commercial organisations.

The team

• Professor Ruth Rettie – Director, Professor
• Dr Kevin Burchell – Deputy Director, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Tim Harries – Deputy Director, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Debra Riley – Research Associate
• Dr Tom Roberts – Research Associate
• Kavita Patel – CHARM PhD Student
• Dr Kate Hammond - PhD Student
• Chris Barnham – Visiting Fellow

Projects

CHARM: shaping consumer behaviour by informing conceptions of 'normal' practice
CHARM, funded by the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme, employs digital technologies as a means of providing individuals with feedback about their own and others' sustainability behaviours. Drawing on the 'social norm' approach, the three-year project examines the possibility of using such feedback to change individual practices and behaviours in socially-desirable ways. CHARM features an energy-use study, an active lifestyle study and a study that uses Facebook. For further details and findings, please go to the CHARM website

Smart Communities: shaping new low carbon community norms and practices
Smart Communities, funded by the Research Councils UK Energy Programme, is a community action project with the objective of reducing energy consumption at home. The project emphasises: working together in cycles of action and reflection, collaboration with local institutions, employing practice theory as an intervention, energy monitoring and energy literacy, the development and adoption of new community norms, comparative energy consumption feedback, sharing experiences and knowhow. Visit the Smart Communities website for further infomation
Contact: Kevin Burchell

Sesame: promoting flood risk adaptation amongst SMEs
Following projects funded by Defra and the Royal Geographical Society, the group is now part of a 3-year collaborative EPSRC research programme to find ways of increasing the flood preparedness of small and medium enterprises. Working with the universities of Durham, Leeds, Sheffield and the University of the West of England, we will be looking at 1/ how to design agent-based models to fit user needs and 2/ how to use the model outputs to promote flood resilience and better business continuity planning.
Contact: Tim Harries

Transforming Feedback
Funded by the EPSRC’s Sustainable Society Network+, this study is a collaboration between Dr Tim Harries and Dr Enrico Costanza (Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton University) explores how interactive, feedback can increase householders’ awareness of their electricity consumption patterns, change attitudes to consumption and stimulate more sustainable patterns of usage. the project will evaluate the effects of enabling people to construct their own practice-level visualisations of the resources they use.
Contact: Tim Harries

Social normalisation and social marketing
Social normalisation refers to a process in which ideas, behaviours, products and practices, which are initially considered to be exceptional or uncommon, are gradually accepted as standard, normal and ordinary, and part of everyday life. Drawing on and developing a range of conceptual and practical insights, this project investigates the potential for social marketers and behaviour change practitioners to contribute to processes of social normalisation by positioning practices as what people normally do. This work is funded by Kingston University.
Contact: Kevin Burchell

Department for Energy and Climate Change projects (DECC)
The group has recently supported the social research company, GfK NOP, on two projects for DECC, working on the evaluation of the Low Carbon Community Challenge and on pre-testing for the Green Deal home and business energy efficiency programme.
Contact: Kevin Burchell

DIASMA: understanding and supporting diabetic self-management amongst adolescents
DIASMA, funded by the Southwest London Academic Network, explores the factors influencing the self-management of type-1 diabetes amongst teenagers and explores whether and how smart-phone applications can help them reduce long-term medical complications and live healthier, more fulfilled lives.
Contact: Tim Harries

PhD study in BPRG
The BPRG invites high quality applications for PhD study in relevant areas. For general discussions of PhD study, please contact Professor Rettie or Dr Burchell.