Abstract
A central goal of behavioral medicine is the creation of evidence-based interventions for promoting behavior change. Scientific knowledge about behavior change could be more effectively accumulated using “ontologies.” In information science, an ontology is a systematic method for articulating a “controlled vocabulary” of agreed-upon terms and their inter-relationships. It involves three core elements: (1) a controlled vocabulary specifying and defining existing classes; (2) specification of the inter-relationships between classes; and (3) codification in a computer-readable format to enable knowledge generation, organization, reuse, integration, and analysis. This paper introduces ontologies, provides a review of current efforts to create ontologies related to behavior change interventions and suggests future work. This paper was written by behavioral medicine and information science experts and was developed in partnership between the Society of Behavioral Medicine’s Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Theories and Techniques of Behavior Change Interventions SIG. In recent years significant progress has been made in the foundational work needed to develop ontologies of behavior change. Ontologies of behavior change could facilitate a transformation of behavioral science from a field in which data from different experiments are siloed into one in which data across experiments could be compared and/or integrated. This could facilitate new approaches to hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery in behavioral science.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the helpful suggestions and edits provided by the metaBUS team, specifically Frank Bosco, Krista Uggerslev, and Piers Steel. We further appreciate the help from from George Alter at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, William Riley, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, the National Institutes of Health, as well as from Robert West at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London.
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Kai R. Larsen, Susan Michie, Eric B. Hekler, Bryan Gibson, Donna Spruijt-Metz, David Ahern, Heather Cole-Lewis, Rebecca J. Bartlett Ellis, Bradford Hesse, Richard P. Moser, and Jean Yi declare that they do not have any conflict of interest.
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All procedures followed were in accordance with ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.
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Larsen, K.R., Michie, S., Hekler, E.B. et al. Behavior change interventions: the potential of ontologies for advancing science and practice. J Behav Med 40, 6–22 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-016-9768-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-016-9768-0