Behavioural Insights (BI) Practitioners-in-training in UBC’s Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights complete a capstone project to apply their developing BI knowledge and skills to real-world problems. As teams turn these projects into working papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, we’ll be posting them to the BI wiki at https://blogs.ubc.ca/biwiki/bi-at-ubc/. This week’s featured project is:
Increasing the Completion of Family Plans in Collaboration with Families
Erin Crowley, Caroline Grenier, & Kelsie Wright
(Advisor: Dale Griffin)
This project aimed to encourage Child Protection Social Workers to complete Family Plans in collaboration with families. A new “Behavioural Insights informed” worksheet incorporated implementation intentions and a BI-informed form used simplification. These interventions were compared to the current Family Plan form in a randomized controlled trial using a 2×2 factorial design. Although the BI-informed worksheet and form did not significantly improve Family Plan completion, data sources yielded conflicting conclusions and not all participants received the intervention materials. Despite these limitations, the project team demonstrated the feasibility and value of using BI and evidence-based decision-making to improve service delivery and outcomes for families.
Keywords: behavioural insights, nudging, implementation intentions, simplification, forms, worksheets, child protection services