Redditors in Recovery: Text Mining Reddit to Investigate Transitions into Drug Addiction
This work addresses the opioid crisis by providing tools to understand drug addiction patterns from online communities, though it is incremental in applying existing text mining methods to new social media data.
The researchers analyzed Reddit posts to predict users' transitions from casual drug discussion forums to recovery forums, finding that mentions of specific drugs and linguistic features in posts can help predict these transitions with their binary classifier and Cox regression model.
Increasing rates of opioid drug abuse and heightened prevalence of online support communities underscore the necessity of employing data mining techniques to better understand drug addiction using these rapidly developing online resources. In this work, we obtain data from Reddit, an online collection of forums, to gather insight into drug use/misuse using text data from users themselves. Specifically, using user posts, we trained 1) a binary classifier which predicts transitions from casual drug discussion forums to drug recovery forums and 2) a Cox regression model that outputs likelihoods of such transitions. In doing so, we found that utterances of select drugs and certain linguistic features contained in one's posts can help predict these transitions. Using unfiltered drug-related posts, our research delineates drugs that are associated with higher rates of transitions from recreational drug discussion to support/recovery discussion, offers insight into modern drug culture, and provides tools with potential applications in combating the opioid crisis.