We are excited to announce that folks from the ATLAS project team have been awarded third place in a Driven Data competition aimed at improving the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), the nation’s most comprehensive registry of suicide mortality and a core dataset in the ATLAS study.

The competition, hosted by Driven Data on behalf of the CDC, was titled Youth Mental Health Narratives and featured two tracks: Automated Abstraction and Novel Variables. The ATLAS team participated in the Novel Variables track, which focused on analyzing the textual data in the NVDRS narratives to identify new variables to advance research on youth suicidality.

Our final project employed a combination of qualitative (i.e., thematic analysis) and computational (i.e., natural language processing) methods to investigate youth suicidality as it relates to social media and engagement in online spaces. Specifically, we identified 5 novel variables that further describe and contextualize decedents’ social media engagement leading up to the fatal event: “Private Sharing”, “Conflict”, “Victimization”, “Withdrawal”, and “Harmful Exposure”. With these novel variables, we aim to describe non-normative online behavior, drawing on the theoretical work of Durkheim as well as the Integrated Motivational-Volitional (IMV) theory of suicide. The full project submission is detailed here.

This award was featured in a news release from the UM Institute for Social Research and the Research Center for Group Dynamics. Additionally, you can read more about the competition and other winners here. Congratulations to the team on this achievement!

The UM-ATLAS team (left to right): [top row] Aparna Ananthasubramaniam, Elyse Thulin, Silas Falde, Lily Johns, Viktoryia Kalesniakva, [bottom row] Jonathan Kertawidjaja, Alejandro Rodriguez-Putnam, and Emma Spring.