Analysis of Smoking and Drinking Relapse in an Online Community

Abstract

Online communities and social media are known to play an important role in improving health efficacy and well-being. In this paper, we examine the role of such platforms in promoting smoking and drinking cessation. We focus on two support communities on Reddit, StopSmoking and StopDrinking, to analyze relapse events among several thousand individuals. For this purpose, we formulate and identify the key engagement and linguistic characteristics of abstainers and relapsers based on participation in the communities spanning almost nine years, and we employ a robust statistical methodology based on survival analysis to examine how participation and these characteristics relate to likelihood of relapse. Our results show that half of the population is at a high risk of relapse within 1-2 months of cessation attempts; however, individuals who continue to abstain beyond three years tend to maintain high likelihood of sustained abstinence. Furthermore, we find positive affect and increased social engagement to be predictors of abstinence. We discuss the implications of our work in tracking effectiveness of online health communities and for designing health interventions.