Grants Awarded for Social Media Research Regarding Substance Abuse

Posted by azdrugrehabctr on October 31, 2014 under Addiction Trends | Comments are off for this article

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded more than $11 million over the next three years to support research of the use of social media to gain more knowledge, prevent and treat substance use and addiction.

The awards are funded through the Collaborative Research on Addiction at NIH (CRAN), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), all components of the NIH.

“We hope to learn more about how changing technologies affect interpersonal communications and factual knowledge about tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs,” said NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow.

Researchers will analyze social media interactions on platforms like Facebook and Twitter to gain insights on patterns of use, risk factors, and behaviors associated with substance use. CRAN issued awards that will support leveraging social media platforms to help fill the gaps in science-based knowledge of substance use as well as the treatment of substance abuse.

Some awards will be used to study how social media can enhance screening, prevention and treatment of substance abuse and addictions by providing a platform to communicate science-based, health-related messages. Social media platforms also have potential to increase how effective prevention and treatments are by providing technologically mediated solutions.

NIAAA Director Dr. George Koob stated that the widespread use of social media puts emphasis on questions regarding the connections between interactive media platforms with substance use and abuse. Dr. Koob also pointed out that social media’s potential as a tool to prevent and treat substance abuse problems.

The subjects to be studied are as follows:

– Social Networks of Recovery: Social Media as therapy development
– Implications of social media content and engagement for alcohol and marijuana use
– Predicting relapse and treatment completion from social media use
– Social media analysis to monitor cannabis and synthetic cannabinoid use
– Mining patterns of substance use by young adults with social media data
– Using Facebook to recruit parents to a parenting program to prevent teen drug use
– A social media intervention for parent support
– Social media, online measure and substance use development in adolescent twins
– Adapting the HOPE social media intervention to reduce prescription drug use.