The impact of social sciences on health behaviour interventions has diminished – more interdisciplinary, culture-focused research is needed

Capturing the impact of social sciences on other disciplines is notoriously difficult. Daniel Holman, Rebecca Lynch, and Aaron Reeves have looked at the example of health behaviour interventions (HBIs), a field recently criticised for failing to draw on alternative, social sciences approaches that emphasise the structured and contextual aspects of behaviour and health. A bibliometric analysis of the HBIs field over the last decade reveals that despite an increase in the number of papers published, the proportion of those that explicitly address issues related to social context has actually diminished. Rather than continuing to focus on individualistic explanations of behaviour, a more thoroughly interdisciplinary approach is required; one that adopts a more nuanced conception of how the social and cultural context shapes behaviour.