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The first step in conducting Barrier Analysis is to define the
goal of your communication effort, the specific behavior(s) you
want to change, and the target groups. Since we want to draw comparisons
between Doers and Non-Doers, for any problem that you will be addressing
through your community health or development program, you will have
to first define exactly what you hope to achieve and the behaviors
that are useful for achieving your goal. Then you need to clarify
what constitutes “doing” and “not doing”
the behavior.
The goal is usually general. For example, your goal may be to improve
child nutrition. What other goals do you have in your programs?
Once you have selected the goal, you need to decide on the behavior
that will be the focus of your analysis. When Barrier Analysis is
used in an ongoing program, we often focus on a behavior that has
not changed very much despite repeated efforts. For example, let’s
say that you had focused on exclusive breastfeeding in a project
area where the HIV rate was high, but only 15% of mothers of children
under six months of age exclusively breastfeed their infants, even
after four years of hard work to change it. (You would know this,
for example, by doing a knowledge, practice, and coverage [KPC]
survey.) We also may focus on behaviors that have been identified
by the community as particularly important.
Your target behavior (in that example) is exclusive breastfeeding
of children under six months of age. Your target group becomes mothers
of children under six months of age.
We will talk about analyzing one behavior, but in reality once
your people are trained in the methodology, you will often have
one small group of staff members analyzing one behavior, and others
analyzing another at the same time so that several behaviors can
be analyzed simultaneously.
Identifying specific behaviors
It’s important that you know how to first identify
then develop specific behaviors that you will promote in a project
area. For each behavior listed, select whether you think the behavior
is specific or not specific.
Let’s now return to our example of exclusive breastfeeding
of children under six months of age and consider how to develop
the behavior question.
Next
(Developing the Behavior Question) 
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