In 2010, the federal government launched a seven-year project called Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency, or BIAS, to explore and test the use of insights from behavioral science to improve social services programs that serve low-income and other vulnerable families.
Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Participation in Social Services Programs is a case study designed as a teaching guide for graduate and undergraduate students in behavioral science courses, as well as practitioners interested in this field. It is multistage process in which researchers analyze each step in a program’s implementation to identify possible “bottlenecks” where the program is not achieving its desired outcomes; adopt the perspective of the program’s participants to search for possible behavioral reasons for the bottlenecks; and design and evaluate behavioral interventions to address those factors
