Has the increased participation in the national campaign 'Dry January' been associated with cutting down alcohol consumption in England?

Characterizing Twitter chatter about temporary alcohol abstinence during "Dry January"

With roots as a public health campaign in the United Kingdom, "Dry January" is a temporary alcohol abstinence initiative encouraging participants to abstain from alcohol use during the month of January. Dry January has become a cultural phenomenon, gaining increasing news media attention and social media engagement. Given the utility of capturing naturalistic discussions around health topics on social media, we examined Twitter chatter about Dry January and associated temporary abstinence experiences. Public tweets were collected containing the search terms "dry january" or "dryjanuary" posted between 15 December and 15 February across 3 years (2020-2). A random subsample stratified by year (n = 3145) was pulled for manual content analysis by trained coders. Final codebook accounted for user sentiment toward Dry January, user account type, and themes related to Dry January participation. Engagement metadata (e.g. likes) were also collected. Though user sentiment was mixed, most tweets expressed positive or neutral sentiment toward Dry January (74.7%). Common themes included encouragement and support for Dry January participation (14.1%), experimentation with and promotion of nonalcoholic drinks (14.0%), and benefits derived from Dry January participation (10.4%). While there is promise in the movement to promote positive alcohol-related behavior change, increased efforts to deliver the campaign within a public health context are needed. Health communication campaigns designed to inform participants about evidence-based treatment and recovery support services proven to help people quit or cut down on their drinking are likely to maximize benefits.

Using Natural Language Processing to Explore "Dry January" Posts on Twitter: Longitudinal Infodemiology Study

BACKGROUND

Dry January, a temporary alcohol abstinence campaign, encourages individuals to reflect on their relationship with alcohol by temporarily abstaining from consumption during the month of January. Though Dry January has become a global phenomenon, there has been limited investigation into Dry January participants' experiences. One means through which to gain insights into individuals' Dry January-related experiences is by leveraging large-scale social media data (eg, Twitter chatter) to explore and characterize public discourse concerning Dry January.

OBJECTIVE

We sought to answer the following questions: (1) What themes are present within a corpus of tweets about Dry January, and is there consistency in the language used to discuss Dry January across multiple years of tweets (2020-2022)? (2) Do unique themes or patterns emerge in Dry January 2021 tweets after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? and (3) What is the association with tweet composition (ie, sentiment and human-authored vs bot-authored) and engagement with Dry January tweets?

METHODS

We applied natural language processing techniques to a large sample of tweets (n=222,917) containing the term "dry january" or "dryjanuary" posted from December 15 to February 15 across three separate years of participation (2020-2022). Term frequency inverse document frequency, k-means clustering, and principal component analysis were used for data visualization to identify the optimal number of clusters per year. Once data were visualized, we ran interpretation models to afford within-year (or within-cluster) comparisons. Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling was used to examine content within each cluster per given year. Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner sentiment analysis was used to examine affect per cluster per year. The Botometer automated account check was used to determine average bot score per cluster per year. Last, to assess user engagement with Dry January content, we took the average number of likes and retweets per cluster and ran correlations with other outcome variables of interest.

RESULTS

We observed several similar topics per year (eg, Dry January resources, Dry January health benefits, updates related to Dry January progress), suggesting relative consistency in Dry January content over time. Although there was overlap in themes across multiple years of tweets, unique themes related to individuals' experiences with alcohol during the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic were detected in the corpus of tweets from 2021. Also, tweet composition was associated with engagement, including number of likes, retweets, and quote-tweets per post. Bot-dominant clusters had fewer likes, retweets, or quote tweets compared with human-authored clusters.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings underscore the utility for using large-scale social media, such as discussions on Twitter, to study drinking reduction attempts and to monitor the ongoing dynamic needs of persons contemplating, preparing for, or actively pursuing attempts to quit or cut down on their drinking.

One-month alcohol abstinence national campaigns: a scoping review of the harm reduction benefits

Over the last decade, one-month alcohol abstinence campaigns (OMACs) have been implemented within the general population in an increasing number of countries. We identified the published studies reporting data on OMACs to explore the following aspects: profile of participants, rates and factors associated with the completion of the abstinence challenge, and outcomes and harm reduction benefits in participating in the challenges. We screened 322 records, including those found in the grey literature, and reviewed 6 studies and 7 Dry July Annual Reports. Compared to non-participating alcohol users, participants were more likely to be female, have a higher income, and a higher level of education. They were heavier drinkers and were more concerned by the consequences of alcohol on health and by their health in general. Participants who achieved the one-month abstinence challenge were lower drinkers and more likely to have registered on the campaign-related Internet communities. Both successful and unsuccessful participants frequently reported health benefits, including sleep improvement and weight loss. Successful participants were more likely to durably change their alcohol drinking habits. Overall, OMACs provide short- or mid-term harm reduction benefits for both successful and unsuccessful participants. Findings were limited by the paucity of studies, their observational nature, and heterogeneity in the features of the different national campaigns, which would probably gain in enhanced internationalization.