Behavioural Science for Public Health
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)'s mandate is to promote and protect the health of people in Canada. Behavioural science plays a central role in achieving this goal. It helps us understand human behaviour and the factors that influence people's health-related choices.
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What is behavioural science
Applied behavioural science combines findings and methods from psychology, neuroscience, economics and other social sciences to better understand how and why people make decisions.
It serves as a cost-effective policy tool that modern public health systems around the world are adopting to support better health outcomes for people.
PHAC's commitment to behavioural science
PHAC is committed to providing people in Canada with timely, trusted and evidence-based information and programs to improve their health.
Behavioural science provides a realistic model for tackling public health challenges, by clarifying how people process information, make decisions and behave.
This process involves understanding the factors influencing decisions, including the social, systemic and environmental elements. Behavioural science in public health integrates an evidence-based understanding of human behaviour into the design of programs, policies, communications and services intended to help people.
The global COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the deep connections between human behaviour and public health.
Populations around the world were being urged to quickly change their behaviours in response to a rapidly spreading virus that was poorly understood. In response, government leaders faced the challenge of making critical decisions with new and evolving evidence to protect the public.
During this crisis, behavioural science played a key role in supporting effective communications and programs to help people better understand information and reduce barriers to engage in healthy behaviours.
Currently, PHAC is using behavioural science to inform Canada's public health priorities, including those that concern:
- climate change
- antimicrobial resistance
- mental health and wellness
- science communication and misinformation
How we work
Behavioural scientists and practitioners have expertise in:
- policy analysis
- qualitative and quantitative research
- knowledge translation and mobilization
They consider how psychological, sociological and systemic factors influence the context and environment in which people make decisions.
Behavioural scientists ask questions like:
- "What choices are people making?"
- "What actions are they taking?"
- "What is driving their choices?"
- "What is preventing different choices?"
In the public health context, behavioural science can be thought of as a lens to help understand and address public health challenges at the individual, group and societal level. Through this lens, behavioural science practitioners seek to design and test solutions to achieve demonstrable and meaningful improvements in behaviour-based public health outcomes.
Collaboration is key
Building connections between the behavioural sciences and the broader public health community is critical to delivering on PHAC's mission to protect the health of people in Canada. Collaboration helps to bring together experts from several fields to address public health issues.
Our scientists and practitioners actively engage in the behavioural science research community, including with fellow experts in academia and other government organizations across Canada and around the world.
Research outputs
Our research outputs take the form of providing advice and generating evidence.
Providing advice
Our scientists and practitioners provide behavioural science advice to government colleagues and officials based on current evidence and research findings.
Providing advice usually comes in the form of a:
- literature review
- behavioural report
- summary of evidence
Generating evidence
We strive to develop and leverage high-quality evidence to provide a deeper understanding of human behaviour. This evidence informs changes to programs, policies and communications that considers people's needs and context.
Generating evidence usually entails in-depth research projects involving a range of methods that gather data to understand the factors behind or barriers to behavioural change. This could involve exploratory or evaluative qualitative research, alongside quantitative evaluation such as surveys or field experiments.
Outcomes from this work are shared broadly with PHAC colleagues and stakeholders to build a rich understanding of a topic area. As such, these research outputs are a valuable resource to inform and support data-driven decision-making, with the aim of improving the health of people in Canada.
Contact us
For more information about PHAC's behavioural science activities, email bescio-bsc@phac-aspc.gc.ca.
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