Step 3: Identify Barriers and Benefits
Now that you have chosen a behavior, priority audience, and measured the baseline level of behavior adoption, the third step is to identify the barriers and benefits affecting behavior adoption. Barriers inhibit people from engaging in your desired behavior, while benefits are motivating factors that overcome those barriers. In order to implement effective behavior-change campaigns, you will need to identify the barriers and benefits that influence your priority audience.
As a key formative step for this phase of the process, you should search other work that has been done with your behavior and use it to help design your barriers and benefits research. Through a literature review, determine whether anyone has attempted to change this behavior before, whether here in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, or elsewhere. This literature review will allow you to identify barriers and benefits or interventions for testing in your own focus group(s) or other qualitative research methods.
Measure the Behavior Baseline Within Your Priority Audience
Once you have completed a literature review, choose one or a combination of the methods below that meet your time, budget and expertise:
Conduct focus group(s)
Conduct focus group(s) by gathering a small group of people from your priority audience for a 60- to 120-minute discussion of the behavior and other issues you have identified. This discussion is led by an objective facilitator, or moderator, whose job it is to hear from all members of the group and ensure that everyone’s point of view is heard and thoroughly understood. Focus groups are most productive when participants are grouped with others who have a similar viewpoint and life experience, so participants speak openly and deeply. This is not a time for education or debate. The goal is to listen. The time for education is later. Therefore, you should probably not choose yourself as the moderator of this discussion, but rather seek a professional who can help you design and conduct these groups.
The goal of the focus group is to learn from participants why they do or do not practice the desired behavior, and what interventions would make them more likely to adopt it. Ideally, you will focus most of your barriers and benefits research on people who are in a “getable” category: not yet performing the behavior but willing to do so. Your baseline research and literature review should help you identify the best audience segments to include in focus groups, as well as the concepts to test in the discussion. As a practical matter, offering an incentive may encourage people to participate in the focus group.
How can important decisions be made based on a handful of discussions with small groups of people? Focus groups rely on consensus and listening for the shared point of view and experience around the table. When discussion becomes animated, people are leaning forward in their chairs, and are adding on to each other’s thoughts, that’s when you know you have hit on a concept that moves a large number of people in your priority audience. Remember, humans are subjective animals, and we make many decisions based on our emotions and perceptions. The focus group process helps you identify those areas of motivation and consensus.
In-depth interviews
If resources are limited or it is not practical to gather your priority audience in a group, consider individual in-depth interviews. In-depth interviews are typically one-on-one, with an interviewer and a research subject. Sometimes in-depth interviews are conducted in small groups of two or three people. This can be done informally over coffee, in someone’s home, or in a more formal setting. The format is shorter than a focus group because the number of participants is small, but all the other principles apply: deep, affirmative conversation, listening, not education, and a probing discussion that arrives at the inner thoughts of the research participant so that you understand what is motivating them. You will start to notice after you have asked a few dozen people that there is consistency to what you are hearing.
How can important decisions be made based on a handful of discussions with small groups of people? Focus groups rely on consensus and listening for the shared point of view and experience around the table. When discussion becomes animated, people are leaning forward in their chairs, and are adding on to each other’s thoughts, that’s when you know you have hit on a concept that moves a large number of people in your priority audience. Remember, humans are subjective animals, and we make many decisions based on our emotions and perceptions. The focus group process helps you identify those areas of motivation and consensus.
Use your barriers and benefits research to:
- Confirm that you have chosen the correct priority audience and have the right approach.
The audience may say they will adopt the behavior, but do you sense they will really do it when you get into the deeper, qualitative research? Have you chosen the right interventions to encourage them to act, or do your ideas fall flat – causing you to have to rethink them? Does another audience need to act before your original audience can take action? For example, if you are trying to get homeowners to plant native plants, but local nurseries do not carry a large selection of native plants, you may need to expand your audience to include decision makers at the local nursery. Now is the time to confront issues like this, before you try to roll out your campaign. - Prioritize barriers/benefits and identify the THRESHOLD barrier.
A threshold barrier is the one barrier (or two barriers) that, if overcome, would cause the priority audience to move forward and adopt the behavior. You may identify a long list of barriers, but if the threshold barrier is not removed, your behavior change campaign will not be successful. For example, if a homeowner does not have bags with them when their dog poops, reminding them to pick up their dog’s poop will not be a successful strategy. Use your audience research to prioritize which barriers and benefits will be most influential in your behavior change campaign.