From left to right: Freya Green, Mikaela Dahlman and John-Tyler Binfet
What’s in a name? As the popularity of animal-assisted activities, education, and therapy continues to grow, so too has the spread of terms and acronyms, leading to some confusion in the field amongst researchers, practitioners and the public.
Recent research from the BARK team’s Freya Green, Mikaela Dahlman, Arielle Lomness, and Dr. John-Tyler Binfet, aimed to examine the current state of terminology used in the field of animal-assisted interventions (AAIs).
“Within our team, we were noticing that nearly every new study seemed to have a new term, and so we started keeping a list,” says Green, program coordinator. “During a conversation, it was brought up all the terms are quite overwhelming for a new researcher, and that’s what sparked the idea for this study.”
The team found that there is an abundance of terminology in the field. The study analyzed articles from four major databases—PsycInfo, Education Source, ERIC, and Scopus—resulting in a dataset of 1,934 relevant papers over a 10-year span. There were 1,414 distinct terms identified in the literature, and found that 48 terms (3.4%) were used 10 or more times, while 1,100 terms (77.8%) were used only once between 2013 and 2023. The study illustrates how a shared language can strengthen AAI research and programming.
“Having shared common terminology is beneficial in a number of ways,” says Green, program coordinator, “I think a couple of the more important reasons are that it would make searching for research more accessible, and it would aid in public understanding of the field.
“For example, I recently saw a sign for horse therapy, and I found myself questioning if that meant therapy for the horse, or therapy for people that involved horses.”
The team hopes the study will spark conversations around how to streamline terminology in the field to ensure it is accessible to incoming researchers and program developers. The team notes that the challenges around acronym use are not unique to those studying human-animal interactions and the study could serve as a template for other fields struggling to keep up with terminology.
The full article, For the love of acronyms: An analysis of terminology and acronyms used in AAI research 2013-2023, can be found on the Human-Animal Interactions website.
The study was recently presented at the prestigious International Society for Anthrozoology (ISAZ) conference in Hartpury, England and was received well by fellow colleagues.
Human-Animal Interaction (HAI) Podcast
You can listen to Freya Green discuss the paper on HAI’s podcast