Through a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Career Development Award (K01-AA030809), Dr. Colditz will get additional training in human-centered design, natural language processing, and behavioral clinical trials. This will allow him to take the next steps in studying how people engage with online forums for addiction recovery. The funded research focuses on people seeking recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) and consists of three primary aims.
Project: Toward measures and behavioral trials for effective online AUD recovery support (2023-2028)
Summary of Aims:
Aim 1. Conduct focus groups with people who use online recovery forums. Ask questions about their engagement patterns, what types of support they give and receive, and how they identify with recovery online and offline. Group members will help to develop a conceptual map of online recovery support, which will be used to develop and evaluate new self-report measures about these topics.
Aim 2. Identify trends in engagement and types of social support provided over time in public Reddit forums for AUD recovery. Develop a behavioral model that accounts for types of support that new forum users engage with early-on, and how that changes over time, through forum engagement patterns. This model will be used to develop a behavioral intervention (i.e., suggestions for how users might engage with recovery forums).
Aim 3. Conduct a behavioral trial, testing the feasibility and acceptability of an educational intervention for recovery forum engagement. The control group will receive basic resources about alcohol use and online forums. The intervention group will additionally receive suggestions for choosing and using online forums. Participants will complete self-report surveys and provide text of their forum messages for language analysis.
Additional details about this grant are available via NIH RePORTER:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10643056