| Popis: |
Health psychology theories are needed to improve capacities to predict, explain, and influence phenomena of interest. Scientific progress is hampered by the ‘theory crisis’, whereby most of our available health psychology theories exist as under-specified box-and-arrow diagrams and imprecise natural language descriptions of the inter-relationships between phenomena of interest. At the same time, a growing body of evidence made possible by recent technological advances highlights that many health-related behaviours display characteristics of dynamical systems (e.g., they fluctuate non-linearly within individuals over time and across contexts). Health psychologists have begun to recognise that we, as a field, must become better able to theorise about dynamical systems if we want to make progress on the most pressing issues of our times (e.g., addiction, obesity, mental health, and climate change). ‘Formal modelling’ (i.e., the mathematical or logical formalisation of a theory’s structure) in combination with a dynamical systems lens has the potential to narrow the gap between emerging empirical evidence and current health psychology theories, and simultaneously equip researchers and decision-makers with tools that can help us tackle the biggest challenges facing our societies today. This will be a scoping review of the extent and nature of research activities pertaining to the use of formal, dynamical systems modelling of health behaviours (e.g., tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, hand hygiene). We aim to synthesise existing methodological steps to provide a set of ‘best practice’ recommendations for researchers who intend to use formal, dynamical systems modelling in future work. We will follow the scoping review guidelines developed by Arksey and O'Malley, starting with the identification and selection of relevant studies, followed by the charting of the data, and the collating, summarising, and reporting of the results. |
