Theories, timing and choice of audience: Some key tensions in health psychology and a response to commentaries on Ogden (2016)

Having become an academic 30 years ago due to the love of ideas and debate, and having spent most of those 30 years not doing this, I have welcomed the chance to think again and before I respond want to thank my commentators for engaging in this process so fully! My call to celebrate variability and critique of the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy (BCTT) and the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW)has not gone without criticism and within these commentaries authors have argued for the benefits of systematisation and consensual frameworks (Johnston, 2016), the feasibility of being innovative within a process of description and prescription (Albarracin & Glassman, 2016), the usefulness of coding and mapping (Abraham, 2016; Peters and Kok, 2016), and the absence of any clear alternative approach to improving behaviour change interventions (Teixeira, 2016). Yet across these very disparate viewpoints three tensions within health psychology have been highlighted which I think remain central to the debate about systematisation. In this response I will briefly discuss these tensions and their implications