Tools for Understanding the Relationship between Behaviours using Ontologies

Everyday life is characterized by a wide range of behaviours - we sleep, we eat, we talk, we recycle, we take our medication, we watch TV, and we drive our car to work. However, psychologists (and other behavioural scientists) often view behaviours in isolation - seeking to, for example, understand sleep or increase levels of physical activity - so we often don’t know how changes in one behaviour might impact others.

We also currently lack a shared language and framework for conceptualising behaviour that allows us to unite disciplines and bring datasets together. For example, what do we mean by watching TV? Is watching Netflix on a laptop the same or different to ‘watching TV’? Ontologies provide the opportunity for scientists and practitioners to work together and create specific, shared understandings.

It is also true that a lot of the evidence needed to understand the relationships between behaviours already exists. Indeed, any study that measures two or more behaviours and allows the correlation to be calculated, can provide an estimate of their relationship, which can be pooled across datasets using meta-analysis.

The TURBBO project gives you tools that allow you to work with ontologies to define behaviours, input data on the relationship between behaviours, run analyses, and visualize the results to provide robust answers to questions about how behaviours are related.

We hope you find it useful. If you have questions then get in touch with the team - we’d love to hear from you.