Background: Opioid-related deaths constitute a problem of pandemic proportions in the United States, with no clear solution in sight. Although 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 health 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 2891 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, using 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 a wide range of community-level biopsychosocial factors related to health outcomes, we found that three of the operationalizations of the five psychological traits examined at the community level in the study were significantly associated with fatal opioid overdoses: extraversion (β=.308, P<.001), neuroticism (β=.248, P<.001), and conscientiousness (β=.229, P<.001). Conclusions: Analyzing the psychological characteristics 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.

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探索“五大”人格特征与致命类鸦片药物过量之间的关联：县级实证分析

背景：与阿片类药物有关的死亡在美国构成大流行病的问题，目前尚无明确的解决方案。尽管解决成瘾问题（这是问题的核心）仍应是卫生从业人员的重中之重，但研究对健康行为有已知影响的社区层面的心理因素，可能有助于通过遏制危险行为演变为健康行为，从而减轻这种健康危机，从而提供有价值的见解。瘾。目的：这项研究的目的是双重的：从理论上和经验上证明社区水平的心理特征与致命的阿片类药物过量之间的关系，并提供使用社交媒体数据实时收集这些心理因素的蓝图，可靠且可扩展的方式。方法：我们在2014年至2016年间从Twitter收集了美国2891个县的年度面板数据，并使用一种新颖的数据挖掘技术来获取平均县级的“大五国”心理特征得分。然后，我们使用控制功能缓解了遗漏的变量偏差，进行了区间回归，以经验检验每个县县级心理特征与致命类鸦片药物过量的患病率之间的关系。结果：在控制了与健康结果相关的各种社区层面的生物心理社会因素之后，我们发现，在社区层面进行研究的五个心理特征的操作性中，有三个与致命的阿片类药物过量显着相关：外向性（β = .308，P<.001），神经质（β= .248，P <.001）和尽责性（β= .229，P <.001）。结论：分析社区的心理特征可能是在当地，州和国家对抗阿片类药物大流行的有价值的工具。卫生服务提供者和社区卫生组织可以通过评估他们所服务社区的心理状况，并根据我们的研究在做出药物过量逆转药物和其他药物分配决策时所预测的关系，来评估致命阿片类药物过量的预计风险，从而从中受益。重要资源。