Behavior change interventions: the potential of ontologies for advancing science and practice

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.

Developing and Evaluating Digital Interventions to Promote Behavior Change in Health and Health Care: Recommendations Resulting From an International Workshop

“…DBCIs represent a qualitative leap in our ability to answer the question posed by researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers: “What works for whom in what settings to change what behaviors, and how?” To optimally organize knowledge about the circumstances (when, where, for whom, and in what state for that person) in which a proposed mechanism of action for a DBCI will produce a targeted effect requires coherent structures and uniform terminologies to describe constructs and their inter-relationships [2,22]. Such knowledge-organizing structures are called “ontologies” [22,23].…”

Feasibility of standardized methods to specify behavioral pediatric obesity prevention interventions

“…Experts across the field of obesity research should collaborate to refine controlled vocabularies around target weight-related behaviors, as is being done in other fields(Larsen et al, 2016). In this study, there was variability in the amount of time spent discussing various behaviors, with physical activity being the most often discussed.…”

Motivating future directions of behavioral medicine

“…Mechanisms of change should be explored to fully understand the process by which a lifestyle or behavior-such as religion and/or spirituality-impacts health outcomes (Park et al, 2016). Behavior change ontologies-a clearly defined, shared vocabulary of terms and the specific relationships between those terms-have the potential to transform behavioral science field to an integrative field where data are compared and contrasted (Larsen et al, 2016). Ontologies could lead to new approaches to hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery in our field.…”