Social Media Interventions for Risky Drinking Among Adolescents and Emerging Adults: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite intervention efforts to date, the prevalence of risky drinking among adolescents and emerging adults remains high, increasing the risk for health consequences and the development of alcohol use disorders. Peer influences are particularly salient among this age group, including via social media. Thus, the development of efficacious early interventions for youth, delivered with a broad reach via trained peers on social media, could have an important role in addressing risky drinking and concomitant drug use. OBJECTIVE: This paper describes the protocol of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing the efficacy of a social media intervention among adolescents and emerging adults who meet the criteria for risky drinking (using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test-Consumption [AUDIT-C]), delivered with and without financial incentives for participation, compared with an attention placebo control condition (ie, entertaining social media content), on alcohol consumption and consequences. METHODS: This RCT involved recruiting 955 youths (aged 16-24 years) via advertisements on Facebook and Instagram to self-administer a brief web-based screening survey. Those screening positive for past 3-month risky drinking (AUDIT-C positive: ages 16-17 years: ≥3 females and ≥4 males; and ages 18-24 years: ≥4 females and ≥5 males) were eligible for the RCT. After providing consent (a waiver of parental consent was obtained for minors), participants completed a web-based baseline survey and several verification procedures, including a selfie photo matched to Facebook profile photos. Participants were then randomized to join invitation-only secret Facebook groups, which were not searchable or viewable by parents, friends, or anyone not recruited by the study. The 3 conditions were social media intervention with incentives, social media intervention without incentives (SMI), and attention placebo control. Each condition lasted 8 weeks and consisted of bachelor's-level and master's-level therapist electronic coaches posting relevant content and responding to participants' posts in a manner consistent with Motivational Interviewing. Participants in the control condition and SMI condition did not receive payments but were blind to condition assignment between these 2 conditions. Follow-ups are ongoing and occur at 3, 6, and 12 months poststart of the groups. RESULTS: We enrolled 955 participants over 10 waves of recruitment who screened positive for risky drinking into the RCT. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study will provide the critical next step in delivering early alcohol interventions to the youth, capitalizing on social media platforms, which could have significant public health impact by altering alcohol use trajectories of adolescents and emerging adults engaged in risky drinking. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02809586; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02809586. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/16688.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.118 | 0.019 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".