Detecting Youth Drinking and Associations with Alcohol Policies via Social Media

 描述（由申请人提供）：源于青春期的酒精和其他药物（AOD）相关问题的严重性和成本使得监测这些行为、识别高危人群和评估预防干预措施（如政策措施）尤为重要。青少年药物使用与该年龄组发病率和死亡率的四个主要原因有关，并导致超过250亿美元的医疗直接费用。 每年在工作中失去的时间和精力。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，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、稳健的亚组调查、灵活的后续行动或向受试者反馈健康警报和信息。利用青少年参与在线社交媒体，及时获取有关酒精使用行为和问题的信息，可以加快公众健康意识，并推动有针对性的应对措施。我们项目的目的是开发一种新的方法来监测未成年人饮酒，该方法以挖掘Facebook中的社交媒体通信为中心。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/不愿意向公共卫生当局或临床医生报告危险行为的青年亚群体;加快“真实的时间”趋势的发现;以及能够对政策干预措施进行评价，以在更大的时间-社会-地理层面上解决影响。我们的具体目标是：目标1 -从用户生成的Facebook数据中获得未成年人饮酒的指标，测试社交媒体和州一级传统监督报告的对应关系。该方法是从13-20岁的美国Facebook用户的公开资料中收集文本报告，通过使用机器学习技术对这些数据进行解析、过滤和分类，从这些数据中创建酒精使用指标。主要假设是：（1.a）社交媒体上的未成年人饮酒模式与传统的监测报告相关，（1.b）因季节/事件而异。目的2 -建立酒精政策环境的有效措施和从社交媒体获得的青年酒精消费措施之间的关系。该方法是确定在州一级测量的现存的、经验证的酒精政策分数与社交媒体来源的未成年人饮酒和危害措施之间的关联（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严格的方法，我们预计这些发现将推动公共卫生方法，以监测未成年人饮酒和危害，并通过以精细的时空分辨率实时调查影响来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.