Behavioural and Environmental Objectives

Now as part of that and coming back to the planning process, you’ll need to be considering for each of those strategies, what are the objectives that you’re wanting them to do? So if it’s a behavioral strategy, who is your target group? What is it that they’re going to be able to do? By when and how much? And then as an example there of a behavioral objective, you’d be surprised how many people are unable to write the who, what, when, and how much objective. But it’s absolutely critical that it’s done during the planning phase and reinforced during the strategy or implementation phase. Because if you haven’t done it now, it’s too late to do it during evaluation.

The same needs to be done if you choose an environmental objective, exactly the same considerations is the behavioral one. Except instead of the whom part of the equation, it might be about what change is going to be happening. So it’s less about who but more about what change. Perhaps it’s about the construction of shade. If for example, sun exposure is a problem.

And for each of those strategies that you choose, You should have an objective down for each of them. So for each objective, you should be able to answer, you know, who are the people or those that you are expecting to change, and/or, what is the action or the change in behavior, or the change in environment, or the change in regulation, and so on. How much do you expect to change? What is the percentage of change in the environment? How many new shade cloths might should put up in schools? How many school canteens might change? What’s available to children? And then, over what time frame? So, these are the fundamentals of writing an objective.

The decision on how to make that decision for what strategy to select is dependent upon the nature of the intervention you’re trying to do. But it is worth just reinforcing again that all of this requires a combination of both science and art.