Addiction and definitions with Robert West

Addiction Audio

In this episode Zoe Swithenbank talks to Professor Robert West about his work on ontologies within addictions. Robert begins by summarising the definitions and constructions that relate to addiction, as well as their meanings and the implications for treatment. He also explains how different definitions can frustrate progress in addiction-related research.

Zoe and Robert then discuss how the addictions sector can learn from other sciences - particularly the biological sciences - about how to use those definitions, labels and ontologies to aid research. Robert covers the work on AddictO Vocab (https://addictovocab.org/) and explains the goal to develop a well-defined construct for anything that anyone might want to refer to in a research paper.

"Ontologies are very specific ways of representing the world that have been developed primarily for use in computer science and data science.... They are very formal systems for representing things called entities. Entities are literally anything you can imagine whether it's real or not real. So 'unicorn' for example, can be an entity for example, as can 'addiction' - as can 'horse'."

Original article: Achieving consensus, coherence, clarity and consistency when talking about addiction by Robert West and colleagues. Published in Addiction (2023)

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