Designing Community Surveys for Behaviour Change Research: A Practical Guide

An impressive set of technologies and recommended management best practices have been developed for
landscape management. All these proposed solutions will fail unless the public – land managers and community
members – are sufficiently empowered and motivated to change behaviours and adopt new approaches.

Changing behaviour, and sustaining it over time, can be difficult. Social psychology and behavioural economics have generated an array of intervention strategies and behaviour change techniques to increase audience understanding,
engagement and, ultimately, adoption of desired behaviours. Hine, McLeod and Driver (2022) proposed four guiding
principles for developing behaviour change interventions:

1. Focus on behaviour.
2. Know your audience.
3. Match your interventions to the primary causes of behaviour.
4. Evaluate, review and reflect.

This guide focuses on an important research tool – community surveys. Surveys can collect information on
current behaviours and intentions and identify factors that encourage or impede engagement in desired behaviours.
In short, surveys provide essential background for designing behaviour change interventions.