What to Expect When You're Diagnosing

Executing a Behavioral Diagnosis: What, How, When, Who, and Why?

Although universities gather a lot of data on students, it is often not inherently collected using a behavioral science perspective. Looking at this kind of data can tell you that students engage in particular behaviors (such as procrastinating on assignments). Interpreting this data using a behavioral lens can help you plan targeted interventions (such as having students use precommitment strategies), often based on patterns in the data and existing research on the topic. However, since the data was not originally gathered using this lens, it often fails to provide insights into why students behave in a particular way.

In a behavioral diagnosis, data gathering is purposefully designed.

What does it mean to purposefully design data gathering? It means that you need to have a deliberate plan guiding your data collection initiatives. This entails careful consideration of a series of factors that help you guarantee that the data you collect is not only accurate but also relevant and useful when it comes to understanding and addressing the behaviors you are studying. 

When executing a behavioral diagnosis from the ground up, data must be purposefully collected. This means that 

• what you ask
• how you ask it, 
• when you ask it, and
• who you ask it to

all flow naturally from why you’re asking it from a behavioral science perspective. 

In practice, this means:

• What you ask: Choose the questions you want to ask having a clear objective in mind. Your questions should be designed to gather the information that directly relates to the behaviors you are looking to understand and the underlying reasons for those behaviors.
• How you ask it: Make sure you think through how you are asking your questions. How are you wording it (do you ask it as a question or a statement)? How are you formatting it (is it open-ended, a Likert scale, ranking, forced-choice, or something else entirely)? In what context are you asking these questions (is it an online survey or an in-person interview)? Determining how to ask a question is important to ensure that respondents can give you an honest and accurate response.
• When you ask it: Timing is crucial! You should collect data at the moments that are most likely to provide you with insightful and relevant information. For example, asking at the beginning of the semester versus right in the middle of finals week might give you very different responses.
• Who you ask: You can’t interact with every single person at your university, right? (You can try, but I am pretty sure you won’t succeed!) Will you talk to professors or students? If students, will you talk to all students or students from a particular educational level, major, or those with specific characteristics (such as those with a GPA under 3)? Selecting the right people to talk to is key in making sure you gather insights that are relevant to the issue at hand!
• Why you ask it: Always ask yourself, “What is the objective?” Each question should have a clear purpose related to digging deeper into the behaviors you are trying to understand. This helps ensure that you don’t just collect random, “interesting” data, but data that is actually targeted and helps inform diagnosis and the interventions you may execute. (This is the same in the medical world! For instance, just because it is interesting to know what my cholesterol reading is, that might not help me understand what to do about a broken wrist!)

The exact details of how to run a behavioral diagnosis vary depending on many factors. Organizational needs, context, and resources, among others, all come into play. However, as a general, high-level outline, here are the steps you can anticipate when you are diagnosing…