Interventions to change health-related behaviours typically have modest effects and may be more effective if grounded in appropriate theory. Most theories applied to public health interventions tend to emphasise individual capabilities and motivation, with limited reference to context and social factors. Intervention effectiveness may be increased by drawing on a wider range of theories incorporating social, cultural and economic factors that influence behaviour. The primary aim of this paper is to identify theories of behaviour and behaviour change of potential relevance to public health interventions across four scientific disciplines: psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics. We report in detail the methodology of our scoping review used to identify these theories including which involved a systematic search of electronic databases, consultation with a multidisciplinary advisory group, web searching, searching of reference lists and hand searching of key behavioural science journals. Of secondary interest we developed a list of agreed criteria for judging the quality of the theories. We identified 82 theories and 9 criteria for assessing theory quality. The potential relevance of this wide-ranging number of theories to public health interventions and the ease and usefulness of evaluating the theories in terms of the quality criteria are however yet to be determined.

改变健康相关行为的干预措施通常效果不大，如果基于适当的理论，可能会更有效。大多数应用于公共卫生干预的理论倾向于强调个人的能力和动机，而对背景和社会因素的参考有限。通过利用更广泛的理论，纳入影响行为的社会、文化和经济因素，可以提高干预效果。本文的主要目的是确定与四个科学学科（心理学、社会学、人类学和经济学）的公共卫生干预措施潜在相关的行为和行为改变理论。我们详细报告了用于识别这些理论的范围界定审查的方法，包括对电子数据库的系统搜索、与多学科咨询小组的咨询、网络搜索、参考文献列表搜索和关键行为科学期刊的手动搜索。其次，我们制定了一系列一致同意的标准来判断理论的质量。我们确定了 82 个理论和 9 个评估理论质量的标准。然而，这些广泛的理论与公共卫生干预措施的潜在相关性以及根据质量标准评估这些理论的易用性和有用性仍有待确定。