Research Priority 1: Collaborative Science
Improving health requires a comprehensive and collaborative approach that integrates BSSR within the health research enterprise, creating an environment for synergistic scientific inquiry. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, critical BSSR questions emerged that can be generalized across health domains:
- What types of behaviors exacerbate or mitigate health risks?
- How can we best communicate health information?
- What are the impacts of economic disruptions on downstream health outcomes?
- How do individuals, families, and communities cope with illness-related stressors?
- How can we minimize inequities during a health crisis and address health care disparities?
To address these questions, OBSSR played a key role in rapidly developing and widely disseminating the NIH Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Initiative on the Health Impacts of COVID-19.6 This initiative resulted in support for more than 50 projects focused on digital and community health and data science. It fostered a community of investigators who produced valuable research findings on such topics as family violence, depression, health care access, emotional well-being, and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. The SBE COVID Consortium, which focuses on disparities and vulnerable populations, continues to produce a growing body of resources to inform policy.
Scientific discovery does not happen in siloes; OBSSR is committed to leveraging innovation in all fields of health science to build toward the vision of health research leading to accelerated scientific discovery, effective treatment and health-promotion interventions, and equitable implementation strategies to improve health for all.
Goal 1: Integrate and Coordinate Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Across the National Institutes of Health
Despite the relevance of BSSR across NIH ICO missions, a 2022 NIH Council of Councils Working Group report found significant gaps and variation in BSSR integration across NIH in research funding, initiatives, staff expertise, review practices, Advisory Council representation, public communications, and strategic planning and policy implementation.
The Working Group noted that improving BSSR integration across NIH will have important implications for NIH’s mission to improve the health of all people. Our Strategic Plan reflects and builds on these recommendations.
OBSSR will continue to coordinate processes that support the integration of BSSR at NIH and across health research more broadly. Specific strategies for coordination and integration include the following:
- Maintaining a staff with diverse expertise
- Actively and systematically reaching out to individual NIH ICOs
- Facilitating the inclusion of BSSR in a disease-agnostic fashion across basic research and the full translational continuum
- Establishing and coordinating NIH-wide working groups to develop funding initiatives for research, training, and career development
- Providing input on review practices and recommendations for NIH policy implementation
- Building infrastructure to support multidisciplinary collaborations
Enhanced integration of BSSR will accelerate our ability to address some of the most complex and pressing public health issues of our time, including climate change, infectious disease outbreaks, violence, and the social and structural drivers of health.
Goal 2: Build a Cumulative Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Knowledge Base
Effective and enduring support for BSSR by NIH depends on strengthening the research infrastructure needed for the full spectrum of BSSR to thrive. The past two decades have seen enormous growth in the complexity of behavioral and social science data. This growth has challenged our ability to collect, standardize, store, and integrate information within and across health domains. To address this challenge, OBSSR will continue to promote the development and use of common terminology and interoperable knowledge representations across BSSR disciplines.
One strategy for building a cumulative knowledge base centers on the development and use of ontologies. An ontology is a “systematic method for articulating a controlled vocabulary of agreed upon terms and their interrelationships.”7 Ontologies serve several purposes, including clarifying concepts, classifying phenomena, effectively communicating between and across scientific disciplines, and integrating data. Rigorous and reproducible BSSR depends on the adoption of clear and consistent definitions for social and behavioral phenotypes, outcomes, and intervention components. Moreover, the specificity afforded by using ontologies can lead to greater precision in experiments designed to test our understanding of the biological, psychological, and social mechanisms underlying behavior and behavior change. Finally, by facilitating the ability to describe relationships across a broad range of social and behavioral indicators and outcomes across disciplines and diseases, ontologies can help researchers better identify targets for behavioral interventions.
OBSSR has promoted the growth of a cumulative BSSR knowledge base by:
- Leading a BSSR-CC Behavioral Ontologies Development Working Group with NIH-wide representation
- Ensuring that NIH’s Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) system reflects the breadth of topics within the behavioral and social sciences
- Enhancing BSSR terminology in the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus used for indexing biomedical and health-related information
- Co-sponsoring the 2022 National Academies of Science Consensus Study on Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences
- Collaborating with multiple NIH ICOs to issue funding opportunities on accelerating behavioral and social science through ontology development and use (e.g., PAR-23-181, PAR-23-182) and to launch a network of new behavioral ontology development teams, in line with consensus study recommendations
Goal 3: Enhance and Connect Basic and Applied Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
BSSR involves basic research and the application of findings in real-world practice and policy. Ideally, basic and applied research endeavors are synergistic and bidirectional, leading to accelerated advances and the potential for greater impact on health and well-being. OBSSR supports both basic and applied BSSR and their integration.
Basic BSSR furthers our understanding of fundamental mechanisms and patterns of behavioral and social functioning, including how these factors interact with one another, biology, and the environment. It can enhance understanding of the complex interplay between individual, family, social, organizational, and environmental experiences that affect population-level health and well-being. The NIH-Wide Strategic Plan: Fiscal Years 2021–2025 highlights the importance of basic biological, behavioral, and social research in advancing biomedical and behavioral sciences.
ICOs at NIH support a broad range of basic BSSR, in such areas as cognitive, affective, and interpersonal processes; behavioral neuroscience; demography and epidemiology; cultural, institutional, and environmental factors; and developmental trajectories. From 2010 to 2022, OBSSR coordinated these efforts through the NIH Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network (OppNet). OppNet funding opportunities supported transdisciplinary collaborations across a wide range of previously understudied areas of basic BSSR, including multisensory processing; biobehavioral studies of stress, selfregulation, and resilience; sleep and the social environment; decision-making and basic mechanisms of behavioral maintenance; culture, health, and well-being; stigma; relationships among epigenetic changes, behaviors, and social context; and social connectedness and isolation. OppNet also contributed to the basic BSSR workforce through career development grants, short courses, and scientific conferences focused on interdisciplinary research. OppNet grants have been administered through more than 20 NIH ICs, fostering the broad integration of basic BSSR into health research.
Following the sunsetting of OppNet and the publication of a 2021 Council of Councils report, Trans-NIH Research Opportunities in Basic Behavioral and Social Sciences, a new Executive Committee on basic BSSR was established. This Executive Committee is co-chaired by the OBSSR Director and includes Director-level representation from 11 NIH ICs, providing an excellent resource for continued discussion of crosscutting priorities and strategies to advance and disseminate promising basic BSSR findings.
Applied BSSR uses behavioral and social science methods to influence health outcomes, mitigate risks, and enhance protective factors. It also seeks to understand the impact of illness or health risks on behavioral and social functioning. Applied BSSR involves the development of interventions that may engage individual, interpersonal, community, institutional, and population targets. OBSSR works to ensure that intervention development frameworks used across NIH consider and integrate all these levels. The NIH BSSR-CC maintains a working group dedicated to the assessment of and improvements in the basic-to-applied pipeline.
The basic and applied fields within BSSR have a complementary relationship. Basic research often provides the foundation for further applied research, and applied research often suggests new, use-inspired directions for basic research. Integrating and ensuring meaningful bidirectional feedback between basic and applied BSSR through multidisciplinary team science is a priority for OBSSR because diverse viewpoints and areas of expertise are needed to tackle the challenges associated with changing behaviors, altering social factors and systems, and improving health.
One illustration of the synergies of basic and applied BSSR and contributions of BSSR to the wider biomedical research enterprise is in the realm of “science of science” research. BSSR addresses both basic and applied science of science questions, such as those related to trust in science, ethical and privacy concerns, recruitment and retention (especially of underrepresented and disadvantaged populations), norms in the conduct of science, and the health impacts of science policies. Basic BSSR in such areas as altruism, trust, persuasion, reinforcement, behavioral economics, decision-making under uncertain conditions, and counterfactual thinking lays the groundwork for innovative approaches to engage participants ethically and meaningfully in research recruitment. This foundational research also supports fair implementation and widespread dissemination of health-related research in real-world settings through enhanced understanding of science communication.
Read More About Research Priorities
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Riley, W. T., Borja, S. E., Hooper, M. W., Lei, M., Spotts, E. L., Phillips, J. R. W., Gordon, J. A., Hodes, R. J., Lauer, M. S., Schwetz, T. A., & Pérez- Stable, E. (2020). National Institutes of Health social and behavioral research in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Translational Behavioral Medicine, 10(4), 857-861. https://doi.org/10.1093/tbm/ibaa075
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Larsen, K. R., Michie, S., Hekler, E. B., Gibson, B., Spruijt-Metz, D., Ahern, D., Cole-Lewis, H., Ellis, R. J., Hesse, B., Moser, R. P., & Yi, J. (2017). Behavior change interventions: The potential of ontologies for advancing science and practice. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 40(1), 6-22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-016-9768-0
