The paper "The Behaviour Change Technique Ontology" authored by Marta Moreira Marques was published

It was detected new necessities from several sources that allowed an improvement of the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1 (BCTTv1) which led to the development of the Behaviour Change Technique Ontology. CHRC and ENSP-NOVA researcher, and collaborating with the Human Behaviour-Change Project, Marta Moreira Marques, was one of the authors of the paper “The Behaviour Change Technique Ontology: Transforming the Behaviour Change Technique Taxomy v1 peer reviews” which objetive is to present a new Ontology of Behavior Change techniques that is expected to be one of the most used tools in behavioral science (evidence synthesis, guidelines, prevention development).

“Behaviour change techniques (BCTs) are defined as the smallest parts of the content of a behaviour change intervention that are observable, replicable and on their own have the potential to bring about behaviour change. For this reason, a method for specifying intervention content was developed in the form of a structured taxonomy of behaviour change. In combination with frameworks such as the Behaviour Change Wheel BCTTv1 has enabled a structured and systematic method for designing and evaluating interventions.

To inform the improvement of the BCTTv1, we brought together user feedback from six sources. These were the BCT website, a user survey, researchers and experts involved in the Human Behaviour-Change Project, an interview-based consultation exercise of researchers and other users, relevant published research reports and other classification systems of BCTs.”

This feedback resulted in a need to extend the BCTTv1, making it possible to improve the labels and make the definitions more precise, and develop the structure to be more flexible, extensive, and multi-level. This led to the development of a Behaviour Change Technique Ontology, where it was possible to create new structures for representing knowledge by defining entities and their relationships, called ontologies.

“This is necessary to investigate how behaviour change intervention components interact in producing effects and explanations of variation across, for example, populations, settings, and behaviours”.

Access to the full scientific paper here: https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/8-308