Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Nov 19, 2019
Date Accepted: Feb 17, 2021
Theory Integration for Lifestyle Behavior Change in the Digital Age: An Adaptive Decision-making Framework
ABSTRACT
Despite the growing popularity of digital health interventions, limitations of traditional behavior change theories and a lack of theory integration hinder theory-driven behavior change applications. In this article we review theories relevant to lifestyle behavior change from a broader psychology literature, and then integrate these theories to a new theoretical framework called adaptive decision-making to address two specific problems. First, our framework represents lifestyle behaviors at two levels, one of individual daily decisions (action-level), and one of larger behavioral episodes (reflection-level), to more closely match the temporal characteristic of lifestyle behaviors and digital data. Second, the framework connects decision-making theories and learning theories to explain how behaviors and cognitive constructs dynamically influence each other, making it a suitable scaffold for building computational models. We map common digital intervention techniques onto the behavioral and cognitive processes in the framework, and discuss possible contributions of the framework to both theory development and digital intervention design.
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