Two Minds Blog

In this post, I will take a look at the Behavior Change Wheel (BCW), a newer framework for understanding health behavior. The model has been around for a decade, but it became much better-known after the book Engaged   featured it in 2020. The BCW model is sometimes called by the name of one of its components, like "the COM-B model." Technically COM-B is just part of the full model diagram, shown above (the green inner circle), so I'm going to refer to the full framework as "the BCW" in this post. As you will see, it might be possible to utilize or accept just one of the BCW's components without necessarily buying into the whole thing. I'm also going to call the BCW a "framework" or "model" instead of a theory. That part comes directly from its creators, who describe the BCW as "a synthesis of 19 frameworks of behavior change found in the research literature" ( Mitchie, Atkins, & West , p. 11). The 19 frameworks are als...

  The scientific environment has changed over the past year, with government agencies canceling previously awarded grants (something that would have been unheard-of before 2025) based on whether they addressed topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Leaving aside the buzzwords for a minute, the focus of these projects was on understanding the experiences of people with a wide range of different life experiences, including some who may not have been well-represented in prior studies. Among my colleagues, some of the targeted grants investigated topics like the mental health of transgender adolescents, the acceptance of HIV prevention interventions, the best ways to promote health among Latino/Latina people, and smoking cessation among people from various gender groups. Researchers have been warned to avoid using certain words in their grant proposals going forward. Now, I recognize that there's political viewpoint diversity in society, and that some people just don'...