Jim McCambridge PhD

Senior Lecturer in Behaviour Change

I grew up in West Belfast during the Northern Ireland conflict. I originally trained in Sociology, and then in Social Work, and went on to work with drug users. I did a trial of motivational interviewing for drug prevention among young people for my PhD at the National Addiction Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry (King's College London).  I moved to LSHTM in 2006 after earlier having completed an MSc in Epidemiology here.

Affiliation

Teaching

I am involved with the MSc in Public Health. I tutor students and am the Module Organiser for Drug, Alcohol, Tobacco Use and Public Health. I also teach on the Ethics, Public Health & Human Rights module.  I have previously taught on LSHTM study modules in Health Promotion Theory and Health Care Evaluation. I'm open to enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in anything here.

Research

I am primarily interested in 'intervention' research. I don't really like that word because most people don’t know what it means, though I don't have a ready made alternative. I try to study attempts to make a difference, and how we evaluate them.

The bulk of my previous research work has been in prevention in the addictions field. This has involved the design and evaluation of individual behaviour change interventions targeting alcohol, cannabis and other drug use among young people and other populations. I am interested in brief interventions, simple things that can be done widely, with potential benefits at both individual and population levels. I'm currently involved in a number of trials, including a number of online studies based in different countries.

My main area of research work, supported by a 5-year Wellcome Trust award,  is on the ways we do research. As well as being interested in the contents of different behaviours, particularly drinking alcohol, and how they may be influenced, my focus is on what happens to behaviour in the specific  contexts of research studies. We've known for more than 100 years that studying people has an influence on their behaviour. Despite this awareness, researchers have been very slow to actually study how this makes a difference to what it is they are trying to study. This makes for bad science. This problem has the potential to mess up studies of behaviour change. Even the best designed studies may have problems that we don't understand well. Ironically because our own practices as researchers are the source of these problems, this lends itself to the use of experimental study methods, simply by doing differently what we usually do.

Randomised controlled trials provide the most rigourous evidence of behavioural intervention effectiveness. Applying the expermental model to large numbers of people in the community, however, makes the design and conduct of public health trials altogether more complex than laboratory studies. If we understood better the messy realities of behaviour change trials, we should be able to get better estimates of how effective interventions really are, and learn more about behaviour change in the process.

Research areas

  • Clinical trials
  • Complex interventions
  • Health promotion
  • Public health
  • Substance abuse

Disciplines

  • Epidemiology

Other interests

  • Alcohol
  • Brief Interventions
  • Hawthorne Effect
  • Performance Bias
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