Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- Creators: College of Health Solutions
Description
This paper describes a thesis project in which I adapted validated survey questions to assess male college students’ perceptions of HPV and the HPV vaccine. Initial studies about HPV were focused on women in order to understand cervical cancer, and it was later discovered that HPV can cause other cancers, even types that can affect men. Because the original research was focused on women, this lead to a delay in research about HPV in males. After the creation of the HPV vaccine, HPV vaccine promotion efforts were historically focused on women, overlooking men as potential targets for this cancer prevention vaccine. This paper briefly describes the HPV vaccine, historic marketing efforts which have focused on vaccinating women against HPV to prevent cervical cancer, and the implications that this presents for men, particularly male college students who are at an increased risk for contracting HPV. College men are an important population to study because of these potential risk factors in addition to discrepancies in their vaccination rates prior to attending a university. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Health Belief Model (HBM) have been shown to predict HPV vaccine uptake among college students, including in studies that focus on college males. For this thesis, I identified questions driven by the two health behavior theories, selected and modified questions for survey research, and am currently conducting the survey using REDCap software at Arizona State University. This project serves to further the conversation about men’s health in regards to HPV and the HPV vaccine in addition to addressing the problematic lack of attention on college males within this scope of research.
ContributorsStewart, Vivian Persons (Author) / Koskan, Alexis (Thesis director) / Green, Ellen (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Background: Natural Language Processing models have been trained to locate questions and answers in forum settings before but on topics such as cancer and diabetes. Also, studies have used filtering methods to understand themes in forum settings regarding opioid use. However, studies have not been conducted regarding training an NLP model to locate the questions people addicted to opioids are asking their peers and the answers they are receiving in forums. There are a variety of annotation tools available to help aid the data collection to train NLP models. For academic purposes, brat is the best tool for this purpose. This study will inform clinical practice by indicating what the inner thoughts of their patients who are addicted to opioids are so that they will be able to have more meaningful conversations during appointments that the patient may be too afraid to start.
Methods: The standard NLP process was used for this study in which a gold standard was reached through matched paired annotations of the forum text in brat and a neural network was trained on the content. Following the annotation process, adjudication occurred to increase the inter-annotator agreement. Categories were developed by local physicians to describe the questions and three pilots were run to test the best way to categorize the questions.
Results: The inter-annotator agreement, calculated via F-score, before adjudication for a 0.7 threshold was 0.378 for the annotation activity. After adjudication at a threshold of 0.7, the inter-annotator agreement increased to 0.560. Pilots 1, 2, and 3 of the categorization activity had an inter-annotator agreement of 0.375, 0.5, and 0.966 respectively.
Discussion: The inter-annotator agreement of the annotation activity may have been low initially since the annotators were students who may have not been as invested in the project as necessary to accurately annotate the text. Also, as everyone interprets the text slightly differently, it is possible that that contributed to the differences in the matched pairs’ annotations. The F-score variation for the categorization activity partially had to do with different delivery systems of the instructions and partially with the area of study of the participants. The first pilot did not mandate the use of the original context located in brat and the instructions were provided in the form of a downloadable document. The participants were computer science graduate students. The second pilot also had the instructions delivered via a document, but it was strongly suggested that the context be used to gain an understanding of the questions’ meanings. The participants were also computer science graduate students who upon a discussion of their results after the pilot expressed that they did not have a good understanding of the medical jargon in the posts. The final pilot used a combination of students with and without medical background, required to use the context, and included verbal instructions in combination with the written ones. The combination of these factors increased the F-score significantly. For a full-scale experiment, students with a medical background should be used to categorize the questions.
Methods: The standard NLP process was used for this study in which a gold standard was reached through matched paired annotations of the forum text in brat and a neural network was trained on the content. Following the annotation process, adjudication occurred to increase the inter-annotator agreement. Categories were developed by local physicians to describe the questions and three pilots were run to test the best way to categorize the questions.
Results: The inter-annotator agreement, calculated via F-score, before adjudication for a 0.7 threshold was 0.378 for the annotation activity. After adjudication at a threshold of 0.7, the inter-annotator agreement increased to 0.560. Pilots 1, 2, and 3 of the categorization activity had an inter-annotator agreement of 0.375, 0.5, and 0.966 respectively.
Discussion: The inter-annotator agreement of the annotation activity may have been low initially since the annotators were students who may have not been as invested in the project as necessary to accurately annotate the text. Also, as everyone interprets the text slightly differently, it is possible that that contributed to the differences in the matched pairs’ annotations. The F-score variation for the categorization activity partially had to do with different delivery systems of the instructions and partially with the area of study of the participants. The first pilot did not mandate the use of the original context located in brat and the instructions were provided in the form of a downloadable document. The participants were computer science graduate students. The second pilot also had the instructions delivered via a document, but it was strongly suggested that the context be used to gain an understanding of the questions’ meanings. The participants were also computer science graduate students who upon a discussion of their results after the pilot expressed that they did not have a good understanding of the medical jargon in the posts. The final pilot used a combination of students with and without medical background, required to use the context, and included verbal instructions in combination with the written ones. The combination of these factors increased the F-score significantly. For a full-scale experiment, students with a medical background should be used to categorize the questions.
ContributorsPawlik, Katie (Author) / Devarakonda, Murthy (Thesis director) / Murcko, Anita (Committee member) / Green, Ellen (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12