Insight & Innovation

Background: 

UKAD are committed to deliver a safe, secure and confidential whistleblowing service, which provides information and support to athletes, and other professionals within sport, to come forward and report their suspicions of doping. We are collaborating with the behavioural change consultancy, Desire Code, to help us identify the barriers faced by athletes (and other individuals in professional sport) and co-create solutions based on behavioural design to encourage people to come forward with information.

The project aims to: 

• Conduct interviews with athletes and athlete support personnel to explore their knowledge, beliefs and experiences of the barriers to reporting doping practices within professional sport
• Design behavioural change interventions that target those barriers
• Implement the interventions within UKADs Protect Your Sport campaign and whistleblowing platforms
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions by comparing baseline data with data collected 6 months post-implementation

Objective: 

By listening to athletes, and other sports professionals, we will identify and understand the key barriers towards whistleblowing. We will utilise behavioural science and design to co-create solutions to encourage people to come forward, with confidence, with information on doping practices.

The project aims to: 

Develop a prototype Artificial Intelligence-based, behaviour change intervention, delivered via a conversational chatbot (WHISTLE-BOT), to promote whistleblowing against doping in sport. The objectives are: 

• Map the social and psychological barriers and enablers towards whistleblowing on doping in sport against theoretical frameworks relating to human behaviour 
• Identify key target areas for the WHISTLE-BOT, and co-design relevant behaviour change techniques with elite athletes and support personnel, to effectively promote whistleblowing against doping. 
• Conduct a pilot evaluation of the WHISTLE-BOT with elite athletes and coaches, to test usability and acceptability, content and conversational design. 

The project includes: 

A rapid and through literature review and assessment of the existing evidence of the barriers and enablers towards whistleblowing against the behavioural change models. Focus group workshops with elite athletes and support personnel discussing ways to mitigate barriers and strengthen enablers, through relevant behaviour change techniques and messages. Deployment and pilot-testing of the chatbot by athletes and evaluation of their feedback. 

Objective 

Design and build the first evidence-based digital behaviour change intervention that promotes whistleblowing against doping in sport. WHISTLE-BOT will motivate and support athletes to report doping misconduct in sport by providing information, reassurance and guidance using relevant behaviour change techniques. 

The project aims to: 

This is 4-year PhD studentship delivered through the CENTRE-UB and the University of Birmingham aims to explore and identify doping behaviours by athletes and to develop a risk assessment model and predictive tool that utilises mathematical modelling to identify potential doping. Anticipated outcomes include:  

• A thorough and up-to-date literature review on doping risk behaviours and indicators, including psychosocial factors and their relative impact on doping risk.  
• Novel insight on the modus operandi of doping athletes, enabling the identification of opportunities to disrupt doping conduct.  
• A new, labelled dataset of variables, doping risk behaviours and indicators, including sources of data on psychosocial factors, that have an impact on doping conduct.  

The project includes: 

Interviews with sanctioned athletes, collation of UKAD and international data wherever possible, analysis of psychosocial indicators of doping behaviour.  

Objective 

Development of an evidence-based risk assessment model and predictive tool identifying individuals at high risk for doping, enabling improved targeted testing of athletes.