Mental and Social Health Commons^™

Enhancing Drug Overdose Mortality Surveillance Through Natural Language Processing And Machine Learning, Patrick J. Ward

Theses and Dissertations--Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Epidemiological surveillance is key to monitoring and assessing the health of populations. Drug overdose surveillance has become an increasingly important part of public health practice as overdose morbidity and mortality has increased due in large part to the opioid crisis. Monitoring drug overdose mortality relies on death certificate data, which has several limitations including timeliness and the coding structure used to identify specific substances that caused death. These limitations stem from the need to analyze the free-text cause-of-death sections of the death certificate that are completed by the medical certifier during death investigation. Other fields, including clinical sciences, have utilized …

The Lived Experience Of Hope In The Midst Of Recovery From A Substance Use Disorder: A Phenomenology, Mary Katherine Lance

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

Substance use disorder (SUD) is difficult to treat, as evidenced by its high prevalence and relapse rates. Research shows, however, that hope may have the potential to create effective and efficient change in the way we prevent and treat SUD. In order to utilize hope in this way, we must have a good understanding of what hope is. This phenomenological study aims to explore and describe the essence of hope through the lived experience of individuals in recovery from a SUD. Through interviews with 20 informants to generate data and an iterative interpretative process to identify shared meanings, hope emerged …

Religious Beliefs And Behaviors As Predictors Of Substance Use In First-Year College Students: A Longitudinal Study, Hannah B. Mcgee

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Substance use is prevalent on college campuses (e.g., Douglas et al., 1997) and can create significant negative consequences (Kodjo & Klein, 2002; NIAAA, 2006). Research suggests that religious beliefs and religious behaviors interact to predict risky substance use in first-year undergraduate students, such that students with religious beliefs but no corresponding behaviors are at risk for significant alcohol use and related problems (Brechting et al., 2010; Cole et al., 2020). However, these studies have only been cross-sectional in nature.

The current study assessed longitudinally if the interaction of religious beliefs/behaviors influenced first-year undergraduate student substance use across the early adjustment …