Patterns of substance use and knowledge of harm reduction among post-secondary students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Presented at the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction's Issues of Substance conference, Ottawa, Ontario (November 25-27, 2019).\n Opioid overdoses remain a significant public health issue in British Columbia. BC’s Centre for Disease Control observed the high water mark of the crisis in January of 2017 and March 2018, when the province saw an annualized death rate of nearly 3.5/100,000. Today, the death rate has subsided to 1.45/100,000 (BCCDC, 2019). Irvine et al. (2019) attribute this decrease to a suite of harm reduction measures introduced by public health authorities. \n Although substance use patterns in post-secondary institutions are a well-studied phenomenon, there is little recent and local evidence to capture a useful description of students’ substance use in relation to recent mounting risks from the opioid crisis in BC. As such, the objective of this study is to explore students’ substance use patterns, and their understanding of related harm-reduction information. \n The study established a clear understanding of students’ current substance use patterns and harm reduction practices across the Greater Vancouver Area. The researchers will use the data to support and reinforce harm reduction intervention programs throughout the college. The study was conducted at Douglas College in British Columbia. Douglas College is a public post-secondary institution located in Coquitlam and New Westminster. The college offers a variety of career programs, transfer course credits, continuing education, and associate degrees (Douglas College, 2019). It is home to 24,801 students, with 4,210 of those students being international students (Institutional Effectiveness Office, 2019). It currently does not offer on-site health services nor residency for students making the researchers’ harm reduction interventions essential on campus. Funding was obtained through The Research and Scholarly Activity Project Fund at Douglas College.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".