Journal article
Analysis of associations between emotions and activities of drug users and their addiction recovery tendencies from social media posts using structural equation modeling
BMC bioinformatics, Vol.21(Suppl 18), pp.554-554
12/30/2020
DOI: 10.1186/s12859-020-03893-9
PMCID: 7772931
PMID: 33375934
Abstract
Addiction to drugs and alcohol constitutes one of the significant factors underlying the decline in life expectancy in the US. Several context-specific reasons influence drug use and recovery. In particular emotional distress, physical pain, relationships, and self-development efforts are known to be some of the factors associated with addiction recovery. Unfortunately, many of these factors are not directly observable and quantifying, and assessing their impact can be difficult. Based on social media posts of users engaged in substance use and recovery on the forum Reddit, we employed two psycholinguistic tools, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and Empath and activities of substance users on various Reddit sub-forums to analyze behavior underlining addiction recovery and relapse. We then employed a statistical analysis technique called structural equation modeling to assess the effects of these latent factors on recovery and relapse.
We found that both emotional distress and physical pain significantly influence addiction recovery behavior. Self-development activities and social relationships of the substance users were also found to enable recovery. Furthermore, within the context of self-development activities, those that were related to influencing the mental and physical well-being of substance users were found to be positively associated with addiction recovery. We also determined that lack of social activities and physical exercise can enable a relapse. Moreover, geography, especially life in rural areas, appears to have a greater correlation with addiction relapse.
The paper describes how observable variables can be extracted from social media and then be used to model important latent constructs that impact addiction recovery and relapse. We also report factors that impact self-induced addiction recovery and relapse. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first use of structural equation modeling of social media data with the goal of analyzing factors influencing addiction recovery.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Analysis of associations between emotions and activities of drug users and their addiction recovery tendencies from social media posts using structural equation modeling
- Creators
- Deeptanshu Jha - San Francisco State UniversityRahul Singh - San Francisco State University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- BMC bioinformatics, Vol.21(Suppl 18), pp.554-554
- DOI
- 10.1186/s12859-020-03893-9
- PMID
- 33375934
- PMCID
- 7772931
- ISSN
- 1471-2105
- eISSN
- 1471-2105
- Grant note
- IIS-1817239 / Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering 1R25MD011714 / Foundation for the National Institutes of Health
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 12/30/2020
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science
- Record Identifier
- 9984446549202771
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