Building a Strategy: Introduction to TIPs, Trials of Improved Practices

From Alive and Thrive, this handout comes from a "Research to Action" case study on designing communication on child feeding in Bangladesh. It defines the "trials of improved practices", or TIPs, method for testing which behaviours focused on as programme recommendations are possible and feasible for people in the intended subject group. It was excerpted from: Designing by Dialogue: A Program Planners’ Guide to Consultative Research for Improving Young Child Feeding, by The Manoff Group and the Academy for Educational Development (AED, now FHI360), Support for Analysis and Research in Africa, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and prepared for the Health and Human Resources Analysis Project, June 1997.

As stated here: "Developing strategies to change behavior requires knowledge of nutrition problems affecting children and information about improved practices that are acceptable and feasible for families. All practices should be tested, ideally in people’s homes, before they are recommended. This is done through trials of improved practices (TIPs), the core method of this research.

Objectives
1. To test mothers’ responses to recommendations for improving infant and child feeding and determine which are most feasible and acceptable.
2. To investigate the constraints on mothers’ willingness to change feeding patterns and their motivations for trying and sustaining new practices...

...TIPS can help refine feeding recommendations. Mothers or primary caregivers are given a choice of recommendations to act on, questioned about their reasons for that choice, and then followed up to see what actually happened....

What researchers and/or nutrition counselors discover through TIPS
• The relative ease or difficulty of communicating various recommended practices;
• Modifications that make the recommendations more acceptable;
• Unanticipated resistance points that limit behavior change;
• Ways in which recommendations are undermined by practices such as dilution, replacement, or children’s resistance to new foods; and
• The approximate proportion of families who are and are not able to modify feeding practices and improve nutrition without additional resources.
TIPs test the feasibility of asking people to carry out the advocated behaviors. (This is different from pretesting educational materials and messages, which occurs much later.)"

The case study kit highlights three steps in designing communication activities. The first of these, building a strategy, includes the use of TIPs. To see the other steps, concept testing and pretesting, click here or see Related Summaries below.


The National Communication Framework and Plan for Infant and Young Child Feeding in Bangladesh is offered as the product of this research-to-action case study, accessible by clicking here [PDF format].