title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA. kai.larsen@colorado.edu.
authors.forename: Kai R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Larsen
authors.affiliation: Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Michie
authors.affiliation: School of Nutrition and Health Promotion, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA.
authors.forename: Eric B
authors.initials: EB
authors.lastname: Hekler
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
authors.forename: Bryan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Donna
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Spruijt-Metz
authors.affiliation: Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ahern
authors.affiliation: Johnson and Johnson Health and Wellness Solutions, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Heather
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Cole-Lewis
authors.affiliation: Indiana University School of Nursing, Indianapolis, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Rebecca J Bartlett
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Ellis
authors.affiliation: National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Bradford
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hesse
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Research Program, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Richard P
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Moser
authors.affiliation: Clinical Research Division, Fred Hutch, Seattle, WA, USA.
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yi
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000592:standards*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D008492:Medical Informatics Computing; D012660:Semantics; D012984:Software; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled
keywords: Behavior change interventions; Behaviors; Controlled vocabularies; Mechanisms of action; Ontologies; Taxonomies