Exploring Substance Use Tweets of Youth in the United States: Mixed Methods Study

Stevens, Robin; Brawner, Bridgette M.; Kranzler, Elissa C.; Giorgi, Salvatore; Lazarus, Elizabeth; Abera, Maramawit; Huang, Sarah X.L.; Ungar, Lyle

doi:10.2196/16191

Cited by 22 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Being “outed” on social media can target LGBTQ youths for physical harm and discriminatory comments, with the potential to affect their mental health and well-being [ 55 ]. Although a study exploring the use of hashtags only found positive and negative outcomes of identity exploration [ 50 ], another study found that hashtags can be used for other purposes, such as connecting peers that use drugs (eg, #highlife) [ 69 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Use and Health and Well-being of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth: Systematic Review

Berger¹,

Taba²,

Marino³

et al. 2022

J Med Internet Res

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Background Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals are at higher risk of poor mental health and well-being. Social media platforms can provide LGBTQ youths with a space that counters heteronormative environments and potentially supports mental health and well-being. Mental health includes an individual’s state of psychological and emotional well-being and not merely the absence of mental disorders. Objective We sought to identify how LGBTQ youths and adolescents use social media for connection with other LGBTQ peers and groups, identity development, and social support and how these affect mental health and well-being. Methods PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) procedures were used to guide this review. Searches were conducted in ACM Digital Library, CINAHL, Ovid Embase, Ovid MEDLINE, and Web of Science in March 2021. This review focused on LGBTQ youths aged 10 to 24 years. Included peer-reviewed studies must comprise social media; explore peer connection, identity development, or social support; and be published from 2012 onward. In total, 2 researchers extracted data and performed quality assessments independently using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for quantitative articles and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme for qualitative articles. Qualitative synthesis was performed on articles that satisfied the eligibility criteria. Results A total of 26 studies (n=15, 58% qualitative; n=8, 31% quantitative; n=3, 12% mixed methods) met the inclusion criteria. Of the 8 quantitative studies, 6 (75%) were cross-sectional, and 2 (25%) were cohort studies. All studies ranged from moderate to high quality. Social media was a popular tool used by LGBTQ youths to connect with LGBTQ communities. In qualitative data, we found that LGBTQ youths negotiated and explored identity and obtained support from peers on social media. Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter were commonly used to access LGBTQ content owing to ease of anonymity. Identity management was the most studied social media affordance, important to LGBTQ youths for strategic disclosure. Key strategies for managing identities included being anonymous, censoring locations or content, restricting audiences, and using multiple accounts. Quantitative studies (3/8, 38%) showed that social media was associated with reduced mental health concerns and increased well-being among LGBTQ youths. Mental health concerns arising from social media use were attributed to discrimination, victimization, and policies that did not accommodate changed identities. Conclusions We found that social media may support the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ youths through peer connection, identity management, and social support, but findings were limited by weaknesses in the evidence. More robust and longitudinal studies are needed to determine the relationship between social media use and LGBTQ mental health, particularly among adolescents. The findings may inform interventions to promote social media health literacy and the mental health and well-being of this vulnerable group. Trial Registration PROSPERO CRD42020222535; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=222535

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Use and Health and Well-being of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth: Systematic Review

Berger¹,

Taba²,

Marino³

et al. 2022

J Med Internet Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Three of the studies 53,78,79 drew upon an extant model 120 that employs a predictive lexicon for multi-class classification of age groups or gender for their applications. None of these studies created a validation corpus to assess the performance of the system which was originally reported as 89.9% accuracy for gender and 0.84 Pearsons correlation coefficient for age.…”

Section: Open-source Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scoping Review of Methods and Annotated Datasets Used to Predict Gender and Age of Twitter Users

O’Connor

Golder

Weissenbacher

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Real World Data (RWD) has been identified as a key information source in health and social science research. An important, and readily available source of RWD is social media. Identifying the gender and age of the authors of social media posts is necessary for assessing the representativeness of the sample by these key demographics and enables researchers to study subgroups and disparities. However, deciphering the age and gender of social media users can be challenging. We present a scoping review of the literature and summarize the automated methods used to predict age and gender of Twitter users. We used a systematic search method to identify relevant literature, of which 74 met our inclusion criteria. We found that although methods to extract age and gender evolved over time to utilize deep neural networks, many still relied on more traditional machine learning methods. Gender prediction has achieved higher reported performance, while prediction of age performance lags, particularly for more granular age groups. However, the heterogeneous nature of the studies and the lack of consistent performance measures made it impossible to quantitively synthesize results. We found evidence that data bias is a prevalent problem and discuss suggestions to minimize it for future studies.

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“…Youth substance use represents a public health problem globally ( Somani and Meghani, 2016 ; Stevens et al, 2020 ). The neurological development that occurs during childhood and adolescence combined with the onset of substance use (between the ages 15 and 19) ( Blanco et al, 2018 ) becomes a particularly vulnerable stage that must be studied ( Thorpe et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prevention of Alcohol Consumption Programs for Children and Youth: A Narrative and Critical Review of Recent Publications

et al. 2022

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BackgroundYouth substance use is a public health problem globally, where alcohol is one of the drugs most consumed by children, and youth prevention is the best intervention for drug abuse.ObjectiveReview the latest evidence of alcohol use prevention programs in empirical research, oriented to all fields of action among children and youth.MethodsA narrative and critical review was carried out within international databases (PsychInfo, Pubmed, Web of Science, and Scopus) in August 2021 and was limited to empirical studies that appeared in the last five years (2017–2021). A flow diagram was used according to the PRISMA statements. Empirical research articles in English with RCTs and quasi-experimental design that included alcohol, children, and young people up to 19 years of age (universal, selective, or indicated programs) were included. The authors examined the results and conceptual frameworks of the Prevention programs by fields of action.ResultsTwenty-two articles were found from four fields of action: school (16), family (2), community (2), and web-based (2), representing 16 alcohol prevention programs. School-based alcohol prevention programs are clinically relevant [Theory of Planned Behavior, Refuse, Remove, Reasons, Preventure, The GOOD Life, Mantente REAL, Motivational Interviewing (BIMI), Primavera, Fresh Start, Bridges/Puentes], they are effective in increasing attitudes and intentions toward alcohol prevention behavior, while decreasing social norms and acceptance of alcohol, reducing intoxication, and increasing perceptions with regards to the negative consequences of drinking.DiscussionThis narrative and critical review provides an updated synthesis of the evidence for prevention programs in the school, family, community, and web-based fields of action, where a more significant number of programs exist that are applied within schools and for which would have greater clinical relevance. However, the prevention programs utilized in the other fields of action require further investigation.

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Exploring Substance Use Tweets of Youth in the United States: Mixed Methods Study

Cited by 22 publications

References 32 publications

Social Media Use and Health and Well-being of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth: Systematic Review

Social Media Use and Health and Well-being of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth: Systematic Review

Scoping Review of Methods and Annotated Datasets Used to Predict Gender and Age of Twitter Users

Prevention of Alcohol Consumption Programs for Children and Youth: A Narrative and Critical Review of Recent Publications

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