Jensen Michaeline, Hussong Andrea
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of Psychology, 296 Eberhart Bldg, PO Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27412-5001.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Int J Behav Dev. 2021 Jan;45(1):3-10. doi: 10.1177/0165025419889175. Epub 2019 Nov 26.
The ubiquity of digital communication within the high-risk drinking environment of college students raises exciting new directions for prevention research. However, we are lacking relevant constructs and tools to analyze digital platforms that serve to facilitate, discuss, and rehash alcohol use. In the current study, we introduce the construct of alcohol-talk (or the extent to which college students use alcohol-related words in text messaging exchanges) as well as introduce and validate a novel tool for measuring this construct. We describe a closed-vocabulary, dictionary-based method for assessing alcohol-talk. Analyses of 569,172 text messages from 267 college students indicate that this method produces a reliable and valid measure that correlates as expected with self-reported alcohol and related risk constructs. We discuss the potential utility of this method for prevention studies.
数字通信在大学生高风险饮酒环境中的普遍存在为预防研究带来了令人兴奋的新方向。然而,我们缺乏相关的概念和工具来分析那些用于促进、讨论和反复提及饮酒行为的数字平台。在当前的研究中,我们引入了“饮酒话题”这一概念(即大学生在短信交流中使用与酒精相关词汇的程度),并介绍和验证了一种用于测量这一概念的新工具。我们描述了一种基于词典的封闭词汇法来评估饮酒话题。对267名大学生的569,172条短信进行的分析表明,这种方法产生了一种可靠且有效的测量方式,与自我报告的饮酒及相关风险概念呈现出预期的相关性。我们讨论了这种方法在预防研究中的潜在效用。