An online collaborative approach to developing ontologies to study questions about behaviour

Almost all societal grand challenges, whether concerning the environment, health, well-being, or the development of sustainable economic models, have at their heart a need to understand people’s behaviour. However, uniting data and insights across disparate fields requires an explicit and shared understanding of concepts, variables, and ideas (e.g., how to characterise and differentiate behaviours). Ontologies provide a mechanism for creating this explicit and shared understanding and are starting to be developed and used in the social and behavioural sciences. This paper proposes an online co-design approach to use and develop ontologies of behaviour to specify the characteristics of behaviour (e.g., habitual, changeable, effortless) and studies that investigate behaviour as part of a project designed to understand how behaviours are related. We report on our experience of collaborative co-development of ontologies using real-time interactive tools and reflect on the benefits and challenges of our approach. We also offer a set of recommendations for researchers interested in applying such methods to co-develop ontologies. The work contributes to efforts to understand the characteristics of behaviour and enable these to be used to understand questions about behaviour (e.g., is poor sleep associated with greater engagement in habitual behaviours?).