Designing an Intervention Study

Abstract

Traditionally, an intervention has been construed as a set of activities on the part of an “intervenor” to bring about changes in the behavior of target individuals or groups. There are three major paradigms for behavior change: (1) mechanistic (e.g., Skinnerian models); (2) organismic (e.g., Piagetian, Freudian models); and (3) contextual (e.g., family systems, cultural models). With the recent advent of contextual-ism, theories of behavior change have been expanded to include cultural factors that influence behavior. Social learning theory, which has been widely used in HIV prevention research, has been subsumed under a contextual paradigm.