Skip to main content

Currently Skimming:

2 Why Ontologies Matter
Pages 27-48

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.


From page 27...
... A review of 435 randomized clinical trials for youth mental health interventions, for instance, noted that nearly 60 percent of studies (i.e., 258 of the 435) did not use a diagnosis to describe the participants (Chorpita et al., 2011)
From page 28...
... Although this example highlights the predicament of a busy mental health professional, researchers and others seeking literature relevant to many kinds of questions in many domains routinely face similar dilemmas. Another sort of ontological problem can be found in the large and rapidly growing literature on the profound ways that disparities affecting population groups defined largely by race and ethnicity influence human health and development throughout people's life spans (see, e.g., Institute of Medicine, 2003, 2012; NASEM, 2019a, 2021)
From page 29...
... We then turn to the scientific challenges that underlie these problems, looking first at difficulties with generalizing about scientific findings and then at challenges with building and structuring knowledge. BOX 2-2 Concepts, Constructs, and Classes Researchers use the terms concept and construct to refer to behavioral or psychological phenomena -- such as memory, anger, decision making, or attention -- that have been observed empirically (as distinguished from reference to such ideas in everyday speech)
From page 30...
... That leaves them little time to survey, let alone consume, the literally thousands of potentially relevant articles that enter the literature each year.2 Without ontologies to frame the scientific discourse, it is practically impossible for stakeholders to reliably identify the most important developments in their fields. One illustration of challenges facing the behavioral sciences was provided by a recent historical review of 50 years of randomized clinical trials on the subject of youth mental health (Okamura et al., 2020)
From page 31...
... Such manuals have served as a tool for defining different approaches being studied in clinical research trials.3 In their review, Okamura and colleagues (2020) compared this dominant conceptualization of treatments based on manuals to a less widely used way of classifying intervention approaches, in which it is the component practices defined within these manuals, known as "practice elements," that are classified (Chorpita et al., 2005)
From page 32...
... . In contrast, a smaller number of practice elements, only 48, appeared in these manuals, with a slope that is clearly shallower over the latter half of the period.4 As the example illustrates, many new manuals have been developed and tested, but these manuals largely appear to be new combinations of existing practice elements, rather than conceptually distinctive approaches to intervention.
From page 33...
... In this example, it would mean repeatedly testing whether similar collections of roughly equivalent clinical procedures performed better than a control group in a randomized trial. Although it is possible that the past 20 years shown in Figure 2-2 underrepresent some types of innovation, such as how the same clinical procedures were potentially rearranged or re-sequenced, the ability to visualize that innovation depends on having explicit specification of practice elements or procedures and of the ways they are arranged for application; the latter is especially underdeveloped or absent in most areas of behavioral science (Chorpita and Daleiden, 2014, p.
From page 34...
... The report identified generalizability as a serious problem in the behavioral sciences. Ideally, researchers hope to design studies that yield results that are equivalently applicable across different sets of study participants and can be generalized to apply much more broadly.
From page 35...
... , as well as the constructs useful for scientific study. And the challenge of discerning whether two constructs actually describe the same entity or phenomenon has been an issue in the behavioral sciences for more than a century (Larsen and Bong, 2016)
From page 36...
... A more contemporary illustration is the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) , which significantly modified its classification of mental health disorders to reflect current understanding of pathology, setting aside many terms that are rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis (Chute, 2021)
From page 37...
... By identifying correlations among diagnoses and symptoms, for example, it may be possible to replace binary mental health diagnoses (e.g., normal or abnormal) with estimates of where individuals fall along multiple continua (Lahey, 2021; Lahey et al, 2017)
From page 38...
... . Examples abound in the behavioral sciences.
From page 39...
... Such differences have consequences. When the guideline from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association lowered the threshold for high blood pressure to >130/80 mmHg, the number of people eligible for treatment increased by 7.5 million, and 13.9 million people became candidates for treatment intensification (Khera et al., 2018)
From page 40...
... Obtaining consistent results from a number of different measures is often taken to be strong evidence both that the phenomenon in question is real or robust and that the measures themselves are reliable and valid. Yet the availability of multiple measures has not always enhanced progress in the behavioral sciences.
From page 41...
... , a method of measuring traits, attributes, or other constructs of interest in the behavioral sciences. In brief, this method is a way of drawing inferences about the construct being measured from the relationship between an individual's performance on a single question (or test item)
From page 42...
... Ultimately, the return on investments in the behavioral science research is limited when knowledge does not accumulate; when largely similar questions are retested as if they were different; and when findings cannot be easily synthesized or retrieved to guide research, training, policy, and service delivery. Carefully developed ontologies are a key tool for addressing many of the challenges that constrain the behavioral sciences.
From page 43...
... behavioral science ontologies should be and that there are a wide range of perspectives on issues that ontology developers confront in making decisions about how to define concepts and describe their relationships, and we consider many of these in the following chapters. However, our review suggests that thoughtful ontology development and use in the behavioral sciences has the potential to accelerate the creation, synthesis, and dissemination of behavioral science knowledge.
From page 44...
... Commissioned paper prepared for the Committee on Accelerating Behavioral Science Through Ontology Development and Use. Available: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/ resource/26464/Chute-commissioned-paper.pdf Davis, R., Campbell, R., Hildon, Z., Hobbs, L., and Michie, S
From page 45...
... AIMS2. The content and properties of a revised and expanded Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales Health Status Questionnaire.
From page 46...
... . Optimizing observer performance of clinic blood pressure measure ment: A position statement from the Lancet Commission on Hypertension Group.
From page 47...
... European Heart Journal, 39(33)


This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More information on Chapter Skim is available.