Application of Behavior Change Theory to the Development

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BEHAVIOR CHANGE THEORY
• Helping relationships: Promotes seeking and using social support for the healthy
behavioral change.
Kaestner and Speight (1975) emphasized the need for the DMV to provide
assistance to drivers receiving warning letters.
• Counter conditioning: Substitutes healthier alternative behaviors and cognitions for
the unhealthy behavior. Interventions that decrease the perceived attractiveness and
increase the salience and immediacy of negative consequences of a behavior should
in theory increase motivation for change (Miller, 1985).
No reference
• Contingency management: The treatment should increase the rewards for positive
behavioral change and decrease the rewards for hazardous behaviors.
Unfortunately, contingency management techniques have been found to be
counterproductive when applied to individuals who are actually in the early stages
of change, rather than the later stages. The implication of this observation is that
these techniques should not be utilized without knowledge of the stage-of-change
the negligent-operator occupies.
Further research should be directed toward developing new reinforcement
strategies (McBride & Peck, 1970).
Also worth study is the ideal of a follow-up letter that is, in effect, a
commendation (Campbell, 1959).
These results suggest that initial letter contacts that use an incentive strategy may
be a more effective approaches than traditional warning letter programs
(Epperson & Harano, 1975).
• Self-liberation: Helps the individual to realize that the behavioral change is an
important part of one’s identity as a person.
No reference
Transtheoretical Model and Traffic Safety
California’s negligent-operator treatment and evaluation system (NOTES) was
dismantled in November 1994 after the Department of Motor Vehicles terminated the
use of untreated control groups, thereby eliminating the ability to conduct rigorous
experimental research (Marsh & Healey, 1995). The Department of Motor Vehicles’
researchers felt that under this policy NOTES quality would be compromised to such an
unacceptable extent that research results could become unreliable.
The magnitude of this concern is demonstrated by the observation that the 30,000
crashes prevented in California between 1976 and 1995 as a direct result of the Post
Licensing Control Reporting and Evaluation System and its successor, the Negligent
Operator Treatment and Evaluation System, would have been impossible to quantify if
experimental research had been prohibited during that period.
Unlike experimental designs, in quasi-experimental research, the researcher does not
control the assignment of subjects to the various levels of the independent variables.
The researcher can define the independent variables but cannot manipulate them. For