How the Compendium was developed

Development of the Compendium

Learn more about the different stages of development that resulted in the Compendium of Dyadic Behavior Change Techniques v2.0.

Systematic review

To examine Dyadic Behavior Change Techniques (DBCTs) used in dyadic behavior change literature, we first conducted a comprehensive systematic review on dyadic interventions with romantic partners to change health behaviors. The review included 165 studies (comprising 122 unique interventions). We clustered extracted Dyadic Behavior Change Techniques according to their theoretically hypothesized mechanism of action and sorted them according to the domains of the theoretical domains framework (Atkins et al., 2017; Cane et al., 2012).

The resulting Compendium (v1.0) included 160 DBCTs with 76 unique intervention tasks, linked to 30 hypothesized most proximal mechanism of action, nested in 10 theoretical domains.

Please see: Di Maio, Villinger et al., 2024 for the results of the systematic review.

Theoretical integration and refinements

As a next step, DBCTs were linked to theory. Theoretical models or conceptual frameworks integrating social dimensions, such as socio-ecological and dyadic theories, were incorporated wherever applicable, linking DBCTs to specific theories and hypothesized mechanisms of behavior change.

To improve clarity, examples were integrated to illustrate each DBCT. All examples are fictional and represent only one of many possible illustrations. This also applies to the health behavior domain selected in each example. Further, minor refinements were applied to the wording of intervention tasks, behavior change mechanism of action, and domain classifications.

Please note that listing of a technique does not imply its effectiveness.

The Compendium (v1.1) included 260 DBCTs with 74 unique intervention tasks, linked to 38 most proximal mechanism of action, nested in 10 theoretical domains.

Delphi study

Expert consensus and feedback on specific DBCTs, as well as the overall utility of the Compendium for describing and developing dyadic interventions, were assessed across two rounds of a Delphi process and subsequent discussion.

Participants were 20 international experts in dyadic health behavior change (n = 20 first round, n = 19 second round, n = 14 online discussion). After each round, the Compendium was revised and adjusted based on the feedback and input from the experts.

The Compendium v2.0 now includes 219 DBCTs with 73 unique intervention tasks, linked to 32 most proximal mechanism of action of behavior change, nested in 10 theoretical domains. You can download the entire Compendium v2.0 as a PDF here.