Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 25, 2021
Date Accepted: Sep 28, 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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
What’s there to like? The causal effects of alcohol-related Facebook posts on drinking behavior
ABSTRACT
Background:
Adolescents and young adults frequently post alcohol-related content (i.e., alcoholposts) on social media. This is problematic, because both social norms theory and social learning theory suggest that viewing alcoholposts could increase drinking behavior. It is therefore paramount to understand the effects of alcoholposts on their viewers.
Objective:
This study aims to investigate the causal effects of exposure to alcoholposts on alcohol consumption by employing a rigorous design.
Methods:
We conducted a longitudinal study (6 weeks), during which alcoholposts were measured by a newly developed app that copied participants’ (N = 281) Facebook posts to a new secure social media environment. Daily questionnaires assessed alcohol use. Effects of existing alcoholposts were assessed in Phase 1, and effects of experimental posts (i.e., posted by fake participants) were explored in Phase 2.
Results:
Results showed that existing alcoholposts increased the occurrence and quantity of drinking the following day. That is, exposure to a single additional alcoholpost increased the log odds of drinking the next day by 0.27 (b = 0.27, CI = [0.18, 0.35]). Furthermore, the number of alcoholposts also had a positive (predictive) effect on the number of glasses drunk the next day (b = 0.21, CI = [0.14, 0.29]). In Phase 2, when experimental posts were also present, these effects decreased. Experimental posts themselves had hardly any effects.
Conclusions:
This study illustrates clear and direct causal effects of alcoholposts on next day alcohol consumption and suggest that alcoholposts represent an important societal problem that interventions need to address.
Citation
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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.