Dr Stephanie Lyons, University of Manchester

Supporting people to change behaviours like eating well, moving more, or stopping smoking can help them lead longer, healthier lives. Researchers develop ‘health behaviour change interventions’ to support this. Involving people with lived experience, through Patient and Public Involvement & Engagement (PPIE), can help make these interventions more relevant, accessible, and effective. 

PPIE is now widely encouraged by funders and researchers, but we still don’t know exactly how it is being used in behaviour change research, or which approaches work best. For example, we don’t yet know what kinds of PPIE helps recruit participants quickly, ensure participants are diverse, support people to stay in studies, or improve behaviours and health. 

This project will investigate how PPIE is currently used in the development and testing of health behaviour change interventions. It will determine which different types or levels of PPIE make a difference to how successful these studies and interventions are. 

To do this, we will conduct a systematic search to find published research on behaviour change interventions. We will adapt an existing checklist to see how PPIE was used in each study. We will use meta-analysis (a statistical method) to bring results from multiple studies together. We will then understand how much PPIE influences how effective interventions are at changing behaviours. 

This work will provide much-needed evidence on how PPIE can support high-quality, effective, and inclusive behaviour change research. The findings will help inform future research design and improve the development of interventions that support people to have healthier lives. 

The findings will provide evidence to guide future research design and improve the development of more effective, inclusive interventions for healthier lives. It will improve the understanding of how PPIE affects behaviour change/outcomes, recruitment/retention by: