Addressing Barriers to Action: Increasing Cat Guardians’ Compliance with Professional Environmental Enrichment Advice

ABSTRACT

Guardians of domestic cats may seek advice from a veterinarian or professional cat behavior advisor to address problematic cat behaviors. This advice typically involves a degree of environmental enrichment, which guardians sometimes experience as an encroachment on their personal lives and living environment. This may explain why compliance with enrichment advice is often poor and problem behaviors persist. The aim of this study was to investigate how advice compliance can be increased by addressing guardians’ barriers to action. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior as a theoretical foundation, we differentiated between motivational- and capacity-related perceived behavioral control (PBC) to better understand the root of guardians’ implementation resistance. We argue that motivational PBC is a more malleable construct than capacity PBC and tested the hypothesis that motivational PBC can increase when guardians experience social pressure when other guardians hold positive beliefs about environmental enrichment (subjective norm). We conducted a survey of 221 cat guardians who were asked to imagine they had sought and received enrichment advice to address their cat’s behavioral problems. The positive or negative beliefs and actions of other cat guardians with respect to environmental enrichment were varied experimentally as a means of influencing the subjective norm. Results confirmed the prediction that exposure to others’ positive enrichment beliefs (versus negative enrichment beliefs) results in a more positive subjective norm with respect to enrichment, which subsequently increases motivational PBC and compliance intention. Although compliance intention was also predicted by capacity PBC, capacity PBC was not influenced by subjective norm, as expected. This study is the first to differentiate between motivational- and capacity-related PBC as barriers to action, which proved fruitful. Understanding the nature of clients’ implementation resistance helps practitioners select the most appropriate technique to address barriers to action. We offer several practical recommendations to this end.

KEYWORDS:

• Cats
• environmental enrichment
• human–animal interaction
• implementation resistance
• perceived behavioral control
• treatment compliance

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Karlijn Heutinck and Rajshree Kanhailal for their contributions to the literature search and data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support this study are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions.

Notes

1 This differentiation bears some resemblance to the distinction between self-efficacy and control as two components of PBC made in previous studies (e.g., Armitage & Conner, 1999). However, whereas a lack of control to perform the behavior could be construed as a capacity-related barrier, self-efficacy is synonymous with the general construct PBC in the original formulation of the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991).

2 Participants were asked, in the subsequent questionnaire, to rate the credibility of the advisor on two items (“To what extent would you describe the person who gave you advice as ‘ … an expert?’, ‘ … professional?’”; 1 = not at all, 5 = very much; r = 0.80). An overall mean well above the scale midpoint revealed that the advisor was judged to be credible (M = 3.51, SD = 0.90, t₍₂₂₀₎ = 8.45, p < 0.001), which indicates that guardians could not easily discard the advice owing to a lack of source credibility. Participants were also asked to rate the perceived severity of the advice on three bipolar items (α = 0.83; e.g., 1 = severe, 5 = mild, reverse coded). The recommended measures were judged as moderately severe – around the scale midpoint (M = 3.00, SD = 0.95, t₍₂₂₀₎ = –0.05, ns). This suggests that the advice was sufficiently severe to raise barriers but not so severe as to make implementation unfeasible.