The Social Interactome of Recovery: Social Media as Therapy Development

描述(申请人提供)：虽然被确认为慢性复发性障碍，但成瘾在很大程度上仍被视为一种急性障碍。为了更好地将成瘾作为一种慢性病来对待，应该提供自我管理和社会支持。社交媒体为安排和发展持续复苏所需的社会支持系统提供了独特且具有成本效益的机会。不幸的是，关于开发一种有效的社交媒体渠道的具体方法，以促进用户自我管理、采取健康行为、参与有效治疗以及在康复者之间进行思想交流，人们知之甚少。社会网络科学的进展表明，社会互动是复杂的动态系统，具有突发性(例如，参与性)，不能归结为这些社会网络中的个人。这个拟议的项目是一项系统性的努力，旨在将关于在线社交网络新兴属性的基础研究转化为支持持续成瘾康复的基础研究。在这里，我们建议从国际戒烟与康复注册中心招募1536名处于康复中的多物质依赖患者参加两项意向治疗随机对照试验。在这些实验中，我们将检验社会网络的拓扑结构(实验1)和个体之间的相似性(实验2)是否强烈影响社会网络的参与、探索、社交学习和参与有效的治疗。我们还将了解这种接触是否有助于继续戒除毒瘾。我们的假设是，连接和网络中具有更大冗余的拓扑结构以及个体间相似性增加的网络将增加网络成员之间的参与度和参与度，这种参与度的增加将转化为组成员复发率的降低。由于毒品相关行为受到群体压力和社会学习的强烈影响，这两个变量对参与有效治疗和其他支持康复的人的潜在影响可能会对试图达到完全康复状态但未能达到完全康复状态的个人产生的社会成本产生重大影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although recognized as a chronic relapsing disorder, addiction is still largely treated as an acute disorder. To better treat addiction as a chronic disorder, self-management and social support should be provided. Social media provides a unique and cost-effective opportunity to arrange and develop the social support system necessary for sustained recovery. Unfortunately, little is known about the specific methods to develop an efficacious social media outlet that facilitates user self-management, the adoption of health behavior, engagement in efficacious treatment, and the flow of ideas among those in recovery. Advances in social network science have demonstrated that social interactions are complex dynamical systems with emergent properties (e.g., engagement), not reducible to the individuals in those social networks. This proposed project is a systematic effort to translate basic research on the emergent properties of online social networks to support continued addiction recovery. Here we propose to recruit 1536 poly-substance dependent individuals in recovery from the International Quit & Recovery Registry to participate in two intent-to-treat randomized controlled trials. In these trials, we will examine whether topology of the social network (Experiment 1) and the similarity of individuals to one another (Experiment 2) strongly influence social network engagement, exploration, social learning, and involvement in an efficacious treatment. We will also learn whether such engagement supports continued recovery from addiction. Our hypotheses are that topologies with greater redundancy in connections and networks with increased similarity across individuals will increase involvement and engagement among network members, and this increased involvement will translate into decreases in the relapse rate of group members. As drug-related behaviors are strongly influenced by group pressure and social learning, the potential effects of these two variables on engagement with efficacious treatment and others supportive of recovery could have a dramatic impact on the societal cost incurred by individuals who attempt and fail to reach full recovery status.