Detecting Youth Drinking and Associations with Alcohol Policies via Social Media

 描述(由申请者提供)：源于青春期的酒精和其他药物(AOD)相关问题的规模和成本使得监测这些行为、识别高危群体和评估政策措施等预防措施尤为重要。青少年药物使用与该年龄段发病率和死亡率的四大主要原因有关，并导致超过250亿美元的医疗直接成本 每年都在关心和浪费工作时间。基于分母的健康监测系统提供具有人口代表性的结构化数据，以便为政策提供信息，并指导临床和研究目标以解决这一问题。然而，调查时间框架和抽样框架不支持实时监测、强有力的分组调查、灵活的后续行动或向受试者提供健康警报和信息的反馈。利用年轻人对在线社交媒体的参与来获取有关饮酒行为和问题的及时信息，可能会提高公众健康意识，并推动有针对性的反应。我们项目的目的是开发一种新的方法，以挖掘Facebook中的社交媒体交流为中心，对未成年人饮酒进行公共健康监测。该方法可以：填补关于危险、污名化或敏感行为的知识空白；描述可能没有机会/意愿向公共卫生当局或临床医生报告危险行为的青年亚群；加快对趋势的“实时”检测；以及能够在更大的时间-社会-地理层面上评估解决影响的政策干预措施。我们的具体目标是：目标1-从用户生成的Facebook数据中得出未成年人饮酒的指标，在州一级测试社交媒体和传统监测报告的一致性。该方法是从13-20岁的美国Facebook用户的公共档案中收集文本报告，通过使用机器学习技术对这些数据进行解析、过滤和分类，根据这些数据创建酒精使用指标。主要假设是：(1)来自社交媒体的未成年人饮酒模式将与传统的监测报告相关；(1)不同季节/事件的饮酒模式不同。目标2--确定酒精政策环境的有效措施与从社交媒体获得的青少年酒精消费措施之间的关系。方法是确定在州一级测量的现有的、有效的酒精政策得分与社交媒体来源的未成年人饮酒及其危害的衡量标准之间的关联(来自目标1)。主要的假设是，社交媒体对未成年人饮酒的衡量标准将与州一级的酒精政策相关联。通过利用经验丰富的多学科团队的专业知识和全面而严谨的方法，我们预计将得出结论，这些结果将推动监测未成年人饮酒和危害的公共卫生方法，并通过以精细的时间-空间分辨率实时调查影响，产生政策评估的范式转变。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The magnitude and cost of alcohol and other drug (AOD) related problems originating in adolescence make it especially vital to monitor these behaviors, identify high-risk groups and evaluate preventive interventions such as policy measures. Adolescent substance use is associated with the four leading causes of morbidity and mortality in this age group and results in more than $25 billion in direct costs due to medical care and lost time at work annually. Denominator-based health surveillance systems provide population-representative structured data to inform policy and guide clinical and research objectives to address this problem. However, survey timeframes and sampling frames do not support real-time monitoring, robust subgroup investigation, flexible follow up or feedback of health alerts and information to subjects. Harnessing youth engagement with online social media to derive timely information about alcohol use behaviors and problems may accelerate public health awareness and drive targeted responses. The purpose of our project is to develop a new approach to public health surveillance of underage drinking that centers on mining social media communications in Facebook. The approach may: fill gaps in knowledge about risky, stigmatizing or sensitive behaviors; describe subgroups of youth who may not have opportunity/willingness to report about risk behaviors to public health authorities or clinicians; accelerate detection of trends to "real time"; and, enable evaluation of policy interventions to resolve impacts at greater temporal-social-geographic levels. Our specific aims are: Aim 1 - Derive metrics of underage alcohol consumption from user-generated Facebook data, testing correspondence of social media and traditional surveillance reports at the state level. The approach is to collect text reports from the public profiles of US Facebook users ages 13-20 years, creating alcohol use metrics from these data by parsing, filtering and classifying them using machine learning techniques. The main hypotheses are that (1.a) patterns of underage drinking derived from social media will correlate with traditional surveillance reports and (1.b) vary in relation to seasons/events. Aim 2 - Establish the relationship between validated measures of the alcohol policy environment and measures of youth alcohol consumption obtained from social media. The approach is to ascertain associations among extant, validated alcohol policy scores measured at the state level and social media sourced measures of underage drinking and harms (from Aim 1). The main hypothesis is that social media metrics of underage alcohol use will be associated with alcohol policy at the state level. By utilizing the expertise of an experienced multidisciplinary team and a comprehensive rigorous approach, we anticipate findings that will advance public health methods for monitoring underage drinking and harms and generate a paradigm shift for policy evaluation by enabling real-time investigation of impacts at fine temporal- spatial resolution.