You have entered the Pathfinder's decision tree for choosing approaches to behaviour analysis.

Behavioural research is carried out using a variety of methods, e.g. laboratory experiment, field experiment, econometric analysis, etc., in order to understand how actors (organizations or individuals) make decisions, and how those decisions vary according to contextual factors. The insights derived from such applications can then be drawn upon in order to explain decisions in other situations, e.g. why individuals might purchase lottery tickets when the expected value of doing so is negative. In the domain of CCVIA, the application of these methods is based on the assumption that knowledge of what drives individual decision making is necessary in order to advance adaptation. For example, understanding factors explaining household decisions on flood risk reduction measures can help improve the design of flood risk communication strategies. The application of these methods is discussed in the Toolbox section on Behavioural analysis,  here we develop criteria for identifying the critical tasks and selecting methods of behavioural analysis.

It may be noted that behaviour analysis tasks and methods are closely related to decisionanalytical method described in the Pathfinder's section on Appraising adaptation options, as they may employ similar assumptions about actors’ choice processes. However, these types of methods can be differentiated fundamentally from one another on the basis of their goals. Behaviour analytical tasks and methods are descriptive, that is they seek to identify (empirical or theoretical) models that “realistically” describe observed behaviour. Conversely, decision-analytical tasks and methods are prescriptive, that is they seek to identify measures that are optimal under some decision criteria irrespective of whether this “optimal” behaviour can be observed in practice.

The first decision to address is whether it is succificient to describe actors and behaviours. If this is the case, the next task is behaviour description. If it is not sufficient to describe actors and behaviours, further distinctions have to be made in the subsequent steps.