Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 3, 2020
Date Accepted: May 4, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Language toward Change in Virtual Self-Help Groups Predicts the Abstinence of Problem Gamblers: Automatic Change Talk Classifier
ABSTRACT
Background:
Although participation in physical meetings has been shown to be effective in reducing the risk of relapse in gambling, the effects of participating in virtual meetings have rarely been reported.
Objective:
The present study aims to determine the effectiveness of virtual meetings for problem gamblers.
Methods:
Participants were 2,828 gamblers participating in the 99 virtual meetings; 360 had stopped gambling for more than three years (abstinent gamblers) and the other 2,468 had not yet stopped gambling (non-abstinent gamblers). Their 1,665,620 utterances were encoded by the automatic change talk classifier.
Results:
The abstinent gamblers participated in the meetings longer than non-abstinent gamblers (t = 8.26, P < .001). They had more change talks than non-abstinent gamblers (t = 6.46, P < .001). The classifier also showed the optimal treatment options responding to minute changes in their participation and utterances in the meetings.
Conclusions:
Virtual meetings are effective for gamblers. Treatment via the Internet increases the generalizability of treatment because of the size and variety of the data.
Citation
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