The Behaviour Change Technique Ontology: Transforming the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1

Marta M Marques; Alison J Wright; Elizabeth Corker; Marie Johnston; Robert West; Janna Hastings; Lisa Zhang; Susan Michie

doi:10.12688/wellcomeopenres.19363.1

The Behaviour Change Technique Ontology: Transforming the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1

Wellcome Open Res. 2023 Jul 17:8:308. doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.19363.1. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Marta M Marques^#^{1

2}, Alison J Wright^#^{1

3}, Elizabeth Corker⁴, Marie Johnston⁵, Robert West¹, Janna Hastings^{6

7}, Lisa Zhang¹, Susan Michie¹

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London, London, England, UK.
² Comprehensive Health Research Centre (CHRC), NOVA National School of Public Health, NOVA University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
³ Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King's College London, London, England, UK.
⁴ Clinical and Applied Psychology Unit, Department of Psychology, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England, UK.
⁵ Aberdeen Health Psychology Group, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
⁶ Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
⁷ School of Medicine, University of St Gallen, St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: The Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1 (BCTTv1) specifies the potentially active content of behaviour change interventions. Evaluation of BCTTv1 showed the need to extend it into a formal ontology, improve its labels and definitions, add BCTs and subdivide existing BCTs. We aimed to develop a Behaviour Change Technique Ontology (BCTO) that would meet these needs. Methods: The BCTO was developed by: (1) collating and synthesising feedback from multiple sources; (2) extracting information from published studies and classification systems; (3) multiple iterations of reviewing and refining entities, and their labels, definitions and relationships; (4) refining the ontology via expert stakeholder review of its comprehensiveness and clarity; (5) testing whether researchers could reliably apply the ontology to identify BCTs in intervention reports; and (6) making it available online and creating a machine-readable version. Results: Initially there were 282 proposed changes to BCTTv1. Following first-round review, 19 BCTs were split into two or more BCTs, 27 new BCTs were added and 26 BCTs were moved into a different group, giving 161 BCTs hierarchically organised into 12 logically defined higher-level groups in up to five hierarchical levels. Following expert stakeholder review, the refined ontology had 247 BCTs hierarchically organised into 20 higher-level groups. Independent annotations of intervention evaluation reports by researchers familiar and unfamiliar with the ontology resulted in good levels of inter-rater reliability (0.82 and 0.79, respectively). Following revision informed by this exercise, 34 BCTs were added, resulting in a final version of the BCTO containing 281 BCTs organised into 20 higher-level groups over five hierarchical levels. Discussion: The BCT Ontology provides a standard terminology and comprehensive classification system for the content of behaviour change interventions that can be reliably used to describe interventions.

Keywords: behaviour change techniques; intervention reporting; ontology; user feedback.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Wellcome [201524].