Abstract
Background: Identifying how behaviour change interventions are delivered, including by whom, is key to understanding intervention effectiveness. However, information about who delivers interventions is reported inconsistently in intervention evaluations, limiting communication and knowledge accumulation. This paper reports a method for consistent reporting: The Intervention Source Ontology. This forms one part of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology, which aims to cover all aspects of behaviour change interventions . Methods: The Intervention Source Ontology was developed following methods for ontology development and maintenance used in the Human Behaviour-Change Project, with seven key steps: 1) define the scope of the ontology, 2) identify key entities and develop their preliminary definitions by reviewing existing classification systems (top-down) and reviewing 100 behaviour change intervention reports (bottom-up), 3) refine the ontology by piloting the preliminary ontology on 100 reports, 4) stakeholder review by 34 behavioural science and public health experts, 5) inter-rater reliability testing of annotating intervention reports using the ontology, 6) specify ontological relationships between entities and 7) disseminate and maintain the Intervention Source Ontology. Results: The Intervention Source Ontology consists of 140 entities. Key areas of the ontology include Occupational Role of Source, Relatedness between Person Source and the Target Population, Sociodemographic attributes and Expertise. Inter-rater reliability was found to be 0.60 for those familiar with the ontology and 0.59 for those unfamiliar with it, levels of agreement considered 'acceptable'. Conclusions: Information about who delivers behaviour change interventions can be reliably specified using the Intervention Source Ontology. For human-delivered interventions, the ontology can be used to classify source characteristics in existing behaviour change reports and enable clearer specification of intervention sources in reporting.
Highlights
Behaviour change interventions vary greatly in the manner they are delivered
Step 1 - Defining the scope of the Intervention Source Ontology An intervention’s source was defined as ‘A role played by a person, population or organisation that provides a behaviour change intervention’
A ‘role’ in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a type of attribute that is “externally grounded”, that is, it depends on the context or situation of an entity
Summary
Behaviour change interventions vary greatly in the manner they are delivered. Understanding and reporting the delivery of an intervention is essential to understanding its effectiveness, the mechanisms of change and reasons for variation in effectiveness (Dombrowski et al, 2016). Interventions are often developed to be delivered by a specific source, such as delivery of smoking cessation interventions to patients by nurses (Rice et al, 2017), and their effectiveness may not generalise to delivery by other sources (Glasgow et al, 2003) Those delivering the intervention may require certain levels of knowledge and skills, or to have undergone intervention-specific training. The authors state there are 3 components to delivering an intervention, mode of delivery, schedule and source They mention that those delivering the intervention (source) may require certain levels of knowledge and skills, or to have undergone intervention specific training but don’t elaborate. Conclusions: Information about who delivers behaviour change interventions can be reliably specified using the Intervention Source Ontology. For human-delivered interventions, the ontology can be Invited Reviewers version 1
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