Identifying behaviour change strategies used within UK’s national COVID-19 television briefings: A content analysis using the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology

Objectives: Identifying the content of key COVID communications is essential to reflect how improvements can be made in future public health emergencies. National televised briefings to communicate updates and legislation changes were held at regular intervals during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. This study aimed to identify behaviour change strategies used within the UK’s COVID-19 national televised briefings. Design: A content analysis was performed on twenty transcripts of UK national televised briefings, purposively selected for their alignment with key UK COVID-19 milestones between March 2020 and July 2021.Methods: Transcripts were analysed for behaviour change content using Intervention Functions from the Behaviour Change Wheel and the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology. Inter-rater reliability of double-coding was performed using Krippendorff’s alpha.Results: Sixty-nine of the 281 BCTs presented within the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology were identified across the twenty transcripts. The most commonly identified Intervention Functions were Education (100% of transcripts), Enablement (95%) and Persuasion (85%). The most commonly identified Behaviour Change Techniques were Present information from credible influence (100% of transcripts), Advise specific behaviour (90%), Instruct how to perform behaviour (70%) and Deliver instrumental support (70%).Conclusions: The UK’s COVID-19 nationalised televised briefings were lacking Modelling and Training support. Televised briefings during future public health emergencies would benefit from including clear behavioural and outcome goals to guide and empower the public. This article provides an implementation of the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology to code existing, secondary health communication sources.