Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Four in five Canadian adults have at least one modifiable risk factor for chronic disease (e.g., smoking, inactivity, unhealthy eating). Additionally, the prevalence of Canadians with multiple preventable chronic diseases is increasing, which adds complexity to prevention and management. However, contemporary health and behavioural sciences tend to focus on health behaviours in isolation, failing to capture the dynamic interplay of psychological and environmental factors which influence the multiple behaviours contributing to health outcomes. There is an opportunity and a need to develop theory and methods to better understand how behaviour change is impacted by, and impacts upon, the rest of the activities in daily life, and how characteristics of an individual's behavioural patterns are related to their health and well-being. Despite calls in the literature for advancing our understanding of multiple behaviour change, there have not been major developments in theory or methods and efforts to date have been scattered across the literature. My PhD thesis aims to bring coherence to this literature by applying the principles of complexity science and network analysis to better understand and promote multiple health behaviour change.