Going Beyond an Individual-Level Approach with Behavioral Interventions.

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is an ambitious effort to apply behavioral science principles to improving services related to child care, child support, and work support. As is the case with most behavioral research, the BIAS project focuses on individual client behavior. This approach provides significant benefits by allowing for low-cost, incremental improvements that can accumulate over time. One extension to this individual-level approach would be to consider the behavior of individual staff members who work with those clients. Another beneficial but larger-scale extension could be to design macro behavioral interventions that target a group (for example, a family or work unit) or an entire organization (the larger context within which individuals behave). (Author abstract)