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News and Views on Social Marketing and Social Change Home Archives Profile Subscribe Social Cognitive Theory for Social Marketing Research and Practice As social marketers and change agents, our theories drive how we understand and describe problems and propose and test different solutions to them. What is a theory? In science, it is a way in which we think about how the world works - what are the problems, what questions do we ask in our research, what interventions do we design, how do we evaluate outcomes (either positive or negative), and do the expected outcomes really make a difference in the big picture? While there are many theories to choose from, many change agents have only the slightest idea about a few of them if they had a survey course of ‘behavioral theories.’ If they haven’t had a such a course, the use of any commonly agreed upon, and research-tested, framework to think about and change the world plummets. If every social entrepreneur and change agent has their own “theory of change” - good luck with that. Innovation in tackling wicked problems also suffers from unfamiliarity with theories of change as people simply repeat what others have done: there is little exploration of insights that different theories can guide us towards. Learning about other ways of thinking about the world, call them ‘theories,’ can help us adopt different points-of-view about a problem, provide different analogies for thinking through possible solutions, weigh the benefits and risks of selecting one strategy over another, and broaden our perspective (Ness, 2015). And perhaps the bottom line is the conclusion reached by Hornik (2002) that the use of the wrong theory to define and solve a problem is one of the key sources for program failure. Let’s look at the evidence for using theory in solving problems. Hornik & Yanovitsky (2003) argue that designing interventions and evaluations of complex interventions such as social marketing are extremely difficult without a theory of change to guide what variables to measure/change and how to attribute success to the intervention. I suggest you consider that social change is so complex that, without a theory of change (with the caveat that it has research evidence to support it), you are wandering in the wilderness of what and how to develop interventions. Noar et al (2012) reported that only 15/34 (44%) of HIV/AIDS mass communication campaigns reported using theory on which to ground their approach - an improvement from <20% of interventions in the previous decade. Yet, the use of theories in social marketing is largely unexplored despite several systematic reviews of its application. The key reason is that creators of benchmark criteria for social marketing did not include use of theory. Thus, reviews of social marketing interventions by Stead et al. (2007), Fujihira, et al. (2015), Carins & Rundle-Thiele (2014) and Xia et al. (2016) are silent on this basic scientific question - are social marketing interventions based on explicitly stated theories or just made up? I found one review of the use of branding in social marketing programs. Evans et al (2015) found that of 69 articles they reviewed that used branding, 77% of them contained enough information to identify one or more theories that were used in the design and implementation of the branding effort. In one study that did not use benchmark criteria to qualify 155 articles of “social marketing effectiveness,” Helmig & Thaler (2010) found that nearly 2/3rds did not explicitly reference a theory on which the intervention was based. So are theories being applied in social marketing programs? So far most reviewers don’t consider them important when asking the question ‘what makes social marketing effective?’ Perhaps the new definition of social marketing that includes “[an integration of] research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change programs that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable” may lead more program designers and researchers to consider this element of intervention effectiveness when designing and reviewing them. This post is not a review of all the possible theories that could be used in social marketing [see my chapter of theories in social marketing ], but the only one I believe can add a broad and valuable lens in your research and practice. And thanks to a recent article in Translational Behavioral Medicine (Riley et al, 2016), a road map for social cognitive theory (SCT) has finally appeared. The article is the first to present SCT graphically. The authors’ purpose is to create a model for testing dynamic computational modeling of SCT hypotheses. You might not be interested in those details, so ignore the math in the figure below. But the key pieces of the theory, and how they relate to behavior, is what I’m focusing on here. We’re going to walk through it in a moment. First the disclaimers: I am an ardent social cognitive theorist and practitioner. My ‘academic grand-father’ is Albert Bandura , the formulator of the theory who consulted on my PhD dissertation that was under the guidance of one of his students, Dave Rimm. I have been quoted as saying that if every public health person read Bandura’s Social Foundations of Thought and Action the world would already be a better place (but as friends have pointed out, it’s a really thick book - the best ones always are). But enough qualifications: this is the approach that encompasses a broad perspective to learning and behavior change that should be the hallmark of social marketing; not some isolated ideas about benefits and costs, increasing intentions to act, nudges or changing peer and social norms. As shown in the figure (reprinted by permission of the publisher, and you can click on it to see an enlarged version), the key variables in SCT that are important for both intervention and evaluation actions are: Self-efficacy: how confident someone is that they can perform a given behavior is the central issue. Self-efficacy for a given behavior will vary over time, and in different situations. the behavior must also be specifically described. For example, how confident are you that you can eat a fruit with breakfast this morning? Yes, the context is breakfast, and if you don’t eat breakfast, your efficacy is likely zero. But what if you do eat breakfast, what kind of fruit are you confident you could eat - a banana, a papaya, a pomegranate? I don’t know about you, but the differences in my confidence for eating some fruits over others at breakfast is pretty dramatic. Ask me to eat the wrong fruit, in the wrong context, and I’m likely to say “pass.” Confidence in ability to perform the behavior = self=efficacy —> behavior. Self-efficacy can be influenced by several different variables shown on the left; the most important may be by observing other people’s behavior (or vicarious learning). Every time you, or someone else, sees someone do something (and that ‘seeing’ may be through directly watching them in real life, through an audio-visual media such as television or YouTube, hearing about it on a radio or podcast, or reading about it in a book or blog), that person becomes a model for a behavior you might decide to avoid, try, maintain or change. Several factors influence whether you imitate the behavior or not, not least of which is whether you see that person experience positive or negative outcomes. Another important contribution to self-efficacy is a person’s prior experience with the behavior. If I’ve never eaten a pomegranate (as opposed to bananas and papayas), or even tried to prepare one to eat, asking me to eat one for breakfast is going to get you many quizzical looks and questions. Do you peel it? Wash it? Cook it? Slice it? Of course, once I’ve done it a few times - or even watched a video of someone else doing it, my confidence (self-efficacy) for eating one...