Advances in intervention reporting will require greater clarity about both what to report and how to report. Eight characteristics have been identified as essential descriptors in relation to public health interventions [
41]: the content or elements of the intervention (techniques), characteristics of those delivering the intervention, characteristics of the recipients, characteristics of the setting (
e.g., worksite), the mode of delivery (
e.g., face-to-face), the intensity (
e.g., contact time), the duration (
e.g., number sessions over a given period), and adherence to delivery protocols. Adherence is not a characteristic of interventions
per se, and is outside the focus of this paper, as are indicators of generalisation, such as the RE-AIM elements of reach, effectiveness/efficacy, adoption, implementation, and maintenance
http://www.re-aim.org[
4]). Work towards defining characteristics of intervention designed to improve professional practice and the delivery of effective health services has begun by the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group
http://www.epoc.cochrane.org. It covers a wide range of characteristics,
e.g., evidence base, purpose, nature of desired change, format, deliverer, frequency/number of intervention events, duration, and setting. However, neither framework provides a method of reporting intervention content,
i.e., the component techniques.
Work in the UK has begun to construct a nomenclature of behaviour change techniques. Using inductive and consensus methods, systematic reviews of behaviour change interventions and relevant textbooks have been analysed [
14,
42]. This has generated a list of 137 separately defined techniques representing different levels of complexity and generality [
13], and a 26-item list of techniques demonstrating good inter-rater reliability across raters and behavioural domains [
42]. The latter, along with a coding manual of definitions, was inductively generated from systematic reviews of interventions (84 comparisons) using behavioural and/or cognitive techniques, some in combination with social and/or environmental and policy change strategies.
This nomenclature has been used to code interventions in a systematic review of interventions to increase physical activity and healthy eating [
43]. This demonstrated that the interventions comprised, on average, six techniques (ranging from one to 14). By combining this analysis with meta-regression, it is possible to analyse the effects of individual techniques and technique combinations within these mainly multifaceted interventions. Using this method, interventions that combined self-monitoring with at least one other technique derived from control theory were significantly more effective than the other interventions, an effect that would have been missed using traditional meta-analyses. A similar approach has been used by Chorpita, Daleiden, and Weisz [
44] to code and catalogue common features of evidence-based behavioral interventions. These features should include recipients (demographics), setting, mode of delivery, and key targets (
e.g., knowledge, skills, and attitudes). This would represent a significant advance on analysing the overall effect size of heterogeneous interventions.