Development of the social dimensions of health behaviour framework

Despite rapid theoretical expansion in conceptualising individual and environmental processes, the examination of social processes associated with health behaviours has a less cohesive theoretical landscape. The purpose of this mapping review and content analysis was to develop a taxonomy of social dimensions applicable to health behaviours. Michie et al. (2014) 'ABC of Theories of Behaviour Change' text, which includes 83 behaviour change theories, was used as the data-set, whereby an iterative concurrent content analysis was undertaken with respect to all relational/interpersonal psychological dimensions. The analysis resulted in a social dimensions of health behaviour (SDHB) framework of 10 dimensions, including seven sub-types of social appraisal dimensions and three-sub-types of social identification dimensions. The SDHB revealed that specific dimensions, such as descriptive norm, are prevalent in behavioural theories, while other dimensions have seen less attention. Further, while most social constructs in behavioural theories are represented by only one social dimension in the SDHB, other constructs have complex representation. This version 1.0 of the SDHB framework should assist in specifying the core social dimensions in health behaviour, provide a common lexicon to discuss relational constructs in psychological theories, amalgamate the disparate social constructs literature and identify opportunities for further research to advance theory development and interventions.