Definition
Agile Science moves scientific inquiry from asking “what works on average?” to “what works for me?” To do so, it uses evolution-inspired iterative creation, optimization, and repurposing to develop repurposable interventions and components organized by when, where, and for whom they work. Agile science (Hekler et al. 2016) is a process for creating useful and usable behavior change interventions and corresponding usable evidence for supporting decision-making of individuals/patients, practitioners, and policy-makers. The process starts with creating many variations of plausibly useful behavior change interventions for a “niche,” i.e., specified people, places, and times. This is followed by optimizingthose behavior change interventions for that targeted niche. Optimization tests whether the interventions produce the desired real-world success, with definitions of...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References and Further Readings
Collins, L. M., Kugler, K. C., & Gwadz, M. V. (2016). Optimization of multicomponent behavioral and biobehavioral interventions for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. AIDS and Behavior, 20(1), 197–214.
Hekler, E. B., Klasnja, P., Riley, W. T., Buman, M. P., Huberty, J., Rivera, D. E., & Martin, C. A. (2016). Agile science: Creating useful products for behavior change in the real world. Translational Behavioral Medicine, 6(2), 317–328.
Klasnja, P., Hekler, E. B., Korinek, E. V., Harlow, H, & Mishra, S. R. (2017). Toward usable evidence: Optimizing knowledge accumulation in HCI research on health behavior change. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘17), ACM, New York, pp. 3071–3082. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Hekler, E.B., Klasnja, P., Harlow, J. (2018). Agile Science. In: Gellman, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_101944-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_101944-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-6439-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6439-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference MedicineReference Module Medicine
Publish with us
Chapter history
-
Latest
Agile Science- Published:
- 22 May 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_101944-2
-
Original
Agile Science- Published:
- 14 December 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_101944-1