Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Oct 10, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 18, 2021
Exploring the Association Between the “Big Five” Personality Traits and Fatal Opioid Overdose: County-Level Empirical Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Opioid-related deaths constitute a problem of pandemic proportions in the United States, with no clear solution in sight. While addressing addiction, the heart of this problem, ought to remain a priority for health practitioners, examining the community-level psychological factors with a known impact on health behaviors may provide valuable insights for attenuating this national crisis by curbing risky behaviors before they evolve into addiction.
Objective:
The goal of this study is twofold – to demonstrate the relationship between community-level psychological traits and fatal opioid overdose both theoretically and empirically, and to provide a blueprint for using social media data to glean these psychological factors in a real-time, reliable, and scalable manner.
Methods:
We collected annual panel data from Twitter for 2,891 counties in the United States between 2014-2016 and used a novel data mining technique to obtain average county-level “Big Five” psychological trait scores. We then performed interval regression, employing a control function to alleviate omitted variable bias, to empirically test the relationship between county-level psychological traits and the prevalence of fatal opioid overdoses in each county.
Results:
After controlling for wide range of community-level biopsychosocial factors related to health outcomes, we find that three of the five psychological traits examined at the community level in the study are significantly associated with fatal opioid overdoses. Specifically, extraversion is negatively associated with fatal overdoses (βExtraversion = –9.779, P < .001), while agreeableness and neuroticism have a positive impact (βAgreeableness = 11.810, P < .001; βNeuroticism = 5.843, P = .04).
Conclusions:
Monitoring the psychological specificities of a community can be a valuable tool in the local, state, and national fight against the opioid pandemic. Health providers and community health organizations can benefit from this research by evaluating the psychological profile of the communities they serve and assessing the projected risk of fatal opioid overdose based on the relationships our study predict when making decisions for the allocation of overdose-reversal medication and other vital resources.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.