Publications
Click on the dropdowns below to learn more about each of our publications.
Featured Publications
Nathan Aguilar, Aviv Y. Landau, Kauai A. Taylor, Shana Kleiner, and Desmond U. Patton
Abstract
In the 21st century, social media has been utilized to connect youth to peers who share their experiences and provide support. Research shows how gang-affiliated youth use social media to present bravado and express feelings of grief. However, the research focusing on how gang-affiliated youth utilize photos online to memorialize the deceased and convey feelings and experiences of grief and loss is sparse. This qualitative study utilizes a methodological concept that includes theories regarding racial residential segregation and grief and a multimodal analytic technique called Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis. The methodological concept was used to understand the digital grieving practices of gang-affiliated Black youth and how this population utilizes social media content, photos, and emojis (multimodal tweets) in their online memorialization practices. Findings illuminate how this population utilizes multimodal tweets to speak to those who have passed away.
Citation
Aguilar, N., Landau, A. Y., Taylor, K. A., Kleiner, S., & Patton, D. U. (2024). Digital mourning in tweets: Multimodal analysis of image-based grieving practices among gang-affiliated Black youth. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231223732
Abstract
There is currently no passed federal legislation regulating companies creating artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic tools, such as social media e-surveillance tools, facial recognition detection tools, and pre-trial risk assessments. The issue with limited regulation of the deployment of AI technologies is the fact that these algorithms are often biased against people of color, particularly women of color. The job of social work only has a 3% risk of automation, making it the hardest job for robots to do. This is why social work's role in AI development is imperative: social work is not quantifiable, and with collaboration between emerging technologists and social workers, there will be a deeper understanding of justful human connection, and what it means to interface with technology. The tech policy brief discusses the lack of federal regulation regarding emerging tech developments in Artificial Intelligence, and calls for the implementation of social workers within data science spaces.
Desmond Upton Patton
Interactions. 27(2), 86-89. February 2020.
Citation
Patton, D. U. (2020). Social work thinking for UX and AI design. Interactions, 27(2), 86-89.
Desmond U. Patton, Philipp Blandfort, William R. Frey, Rossano Schifanella, Kyle McGregor, Shih-Fu U. Chang
Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research. 11(1). February 2020
Abstract
Social media have created a new environmental context for the study of social and human behavior and services. Although social work researchers have become increasingly interested in the use of social media to address social problems, they have been slow to adapt tools that are flexible and convenient for analyzing social media data. They have also given inadequate attention to bias and representation inherent in many multimedia data sets. This article introduces the Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media (VATAS) system, an open-source Web-based platform for labeling or annotating social media data. We use a case study approach, applying VATAS to a study of Chicago, IL, gang-involved youth communication on Twitter to highlight VATAS’ features and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. VATAS is highly customizable, can be privately held on a secure server, and allows for export directly into a CSV file for qualitative, quantitative, and machine-learning analysis. Implications for research using social media sources are noted.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Blandfort, P., Frey, W. R., Schifanella, R., McGregor, K., & Chang, S. F. U. (2020). VATAS: An Open-Source Web Platform for Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 11(1), 000-000.
Desmond U. Patton, William R. Frey, Kyle A. McGregor, Kathleen McKeown, Emanuel Moss, AIES '20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. February 2020
Abstract
While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. This article introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) ap-proach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication. CASM utilizes a team-based approach to analysis of social media data, explicitly informed by community expertise. We use of CASM to analyze Twitter posts from gang-involved youth in Chicago. We designed a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of a support vector machine us-ing CASM hand-labeled posts against a distant model. We found that the CASM-informed hand-labeled data outperforms the baseline distant labels, indicating that the CASM labels capture additional dimensions of information that content-only methods lack. We then question whether this is helpful or harmful for gun violence prevention.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Frey, W. R., McGregor, K. A., Lee, F. T., McKeown, K., & Moss, E. (2020, February). Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 337-342).
Desmond U. Patton, William R. Frey, Michael Gaskell
Palgrave Communications. 5(1), 1-8. October 2019
Abstract
How should we interpret gun images on social media? Take for example the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School. Media articles revealed that the gunman, a white adolescent male, posted images of firearms and other weapons on his social media profile prior to the shooting. On the other hand, when it comes to Black communities, digital policing strategies often intercept images with guns and individuals thought to be associated with gangs before a crime is ever committed. In this study, we use a mixed methods approach, situated in social systems theory, to make meaning of gun posting behavior among Black youth who associate with gangs in Chicago. We collected and examined a corpus of Twitter images (1851) through snowball sampling of a well-known deceased gang member in Chicago and users in their Twitter network. We identified 560 images that contain guns and asked two distinct groups to annotate images: formerly gang-involved outreach workers, known as community domain experts, at a local Chicago violence prevention organization and Master of Social Work students at Columbia University. After comparing their results, findings highlighted the prevalence and frequency of gun image posting within this corpus and critical differences in how community domain experts and social work annotators perceive guns. The various underlying intents provide a rich source of knowledge for understanding the symbolic nature of guns in the digital age.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Frey, W. R., & Gaskell, M. (2019). Guns on social media: complex interpretations of gun images posted by Chicago youth. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-8.
Policy Briefs
Dr. Siva Mathiyazhagan, Shana Kleiner, and Dr. Desmond U. Patton
There is currently no passed federal legislation regulating companies creating artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic tools, such as social media e-surveillance tools, facial recognition detection tools, and pre-trial risk assessments. The issue with limited regulation of the deployment of AI technologies is the fact that these algorithms are often biased against people of color, particularly women of color. The job of social work only has a 3% risk of automation, making it the hardest job for robots to do. This is why social work's role in AI development is imperative: social work is not quantifiable, and with collaboration between emerging technologists and social workers, there will be a deeper understanding of justful human connection, and what it means to interface with technology. The tech policy brief discusses the lack of federal regulation regarding emerging tech developments in Artificial Intelligence, and calls for the implementation of social workers within data science spaces.
Kelly Anguiano, Eno Darkwa, and Dr. Desmond U. Patton
Due to the perpetually changing nature of the online world, the current laws that cover protections to citizen’s privacy and bodies, do not always cover the entirety of their personhood online, thus allowing for surveillance. The widespread digital policing has serious implications for Black and Brown youth’s lives in terms of the carceral system, as communities of color are socially construed/presented to be problematic sites or “digital hoods.” ‘Patrols’ of activities (including but not limited to liking/commenting on a post) can land an individual on the NYPD gang database. This database disproportionately patrols and targets communities of color: with only 1.1% of the people on the gang database are White, with 66% Black and 31.7% Latinx, with children as young as 13 years old being added.. To promote inclusivity and reduce racial bias, we recommend policy centered on Restorative Justice principles of community involvement- specifically through social media post analysis, to add layers of interpretation prior to law enforcement surveillance and offline involvement.
2022
Aviv Y Landau, Susi Ferrarello, Ashley Blanchard, Kenrick Cato, Nia Atkins, Stephanie Salazar, Desmond U Patton, Maxim Topaz, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, March 2022.
Abstract
Child abuse and neglect are public health issues impacting communities throughout the United States. The broad adoption of electronic health records (EHR) in health care supports the development of machine learning–based models to help identify child abuse and neglect. Employing EHR data for child abuse and neglect detection raises several critical ethical considerations. This article applied a phenomenological approach to discuss and provide recommendations for key ethical issues related to machine learning–based risk models development and evaluation: (1) biases in the data; (2) clinical documentation system design issues; (3) lack of centralized evidence base for child abuse and neglect; (4) lack of “gold standard “in assessment and diagnosis of child abuse and neglect; (5) challenges in evaluation of risk prediction performance; (6) challenges in testing predictive models in practice; and (7) challenges in presentation of machine learning–based prediction to clinicians and patients. We provide recommended solutions to each of the 7 ethical challenges and identify several areas for further policy and research.
Mathiyazhagan, Siva & Patton, Desmond & Salam, Minahil & Willis, Henry. (2022). Social work in metaverse: addressing tech policy gaps for racial and mental health equity.
Abstract
The Metaverse is a new combination of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR), and blockchain (Metz, 2021). These technologies will create a virtual world for social connections, entertainment, games, fitness, work, education, and commerce as a digital economy (Snider & Molina, 2021). The main platform companies behind the Metaverse plan for it to become a virtual marketplace, which will require the collection and potential exploitative use of personal data (Wheeler, 2021). It is proven that existing technologies and algorithms are biased and cause digital harm to vulnerable communities (Pilkington, 2019). As a community of social work scientists and mental health practitioners, we are concerned that the Metaverse may amplify social risks, i.e., the addictive nature of algorithms can exacerbate mental health problems in virtual spaces (Karim et al., 2020; McCluskey, 2022). In light of this, there is an urgent need for social work interventions in the virtual world. Social work in the Metaverse would pave a path for racial and mental health equity to prevent possible digital harm. Immediate implementation of the Metaverse in the present non-regulated tech and social condition has the highest potential of amplifying existing social inequalities and mental health challenges in the virtual universe. Therefore, addressing the US federal technology policy gaps with social work principles related to the Metaverse is an urgent priority. This will prevent an exacerbation of existing social and mental health concerns, and the Metaverse may even be used to benefit racial-ethnic minority communities.
Desmond U. Patton, Nathan Aguilar, Aviv Y. Landau, Chris Thomas, Rachel Kagan, Tianai Ren, Eric Stoneberg, Timothy Wang, Daniel Halmos, Anish Saha, Amith Ananthram, Kathleen McKeown, Community implications for gun violence prevention during co-occurring pandemics; a qualitative and computational analysis study, Preventive Medicine, 2022.
Abstract
This study provides insight into New York City residents' perceptions about violence after the outbreak of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) based on information from communities in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings. In this novel analysis, we used focus group and social media data to confirm or reject findings from qualitative interviews. We first used data from 69 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with low-income residents and community stakeholders to further explore how violence impacts New York City's low-income residents of color, as well as the role of city government in providing tangible support for violence prevention during co-occurring health (COVID-19) and social (anti-Black racism) pandemics. Residents described how COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement impacted safety in their communities while offering direct recommendations to improve safety. Residents also shared recommendations that indirectly improve community safety by addressing long term systemic issues. As the recruitment of interviewees was concluding, researchers facilitated two focus groups with 38 interviewees to discuss similar topics. In order to assess the degree to which the themes discovered in our qualitative interviews were shared by the broader community, we developed an integrative community data science study which leveraged natural language processing and computer vision techniques to study text and images on public social media data of 12 million tweets generated by residents. We joined computational methods with qualitative analysis through a social work lens and design justice principles to most accurately and holistically analyze the community perceptions of gun violence issues and potential prevention strategies. Findings indicate valuable community-based insights that elucidate how the co-occurring pandemics impact residents' experiences of gun violence and provide important implications for gun violence prevention in a digital era.
Aviv Y Landau, Ashley Blanchard, Kenrick Cato, Nia Atkins, Stephanie Salazar, Desmond U Patton, Maxim Topaz, Considerations for development of child abuse and neglect phenotype with implications for reduction of racial bias: a qualitative study, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, March 2022.
Abstract
The study provides considerations for generating a phenotype of child abuse and neglect in Emergency Departments (ED) using secondary data from electronic health records (EHR). Implications will be provided for racial bias reduction and the development of further decision support tools to assist in identifying child abuse and neglect.
2021
March 2021
Abstract
Due to the perpetually changing nature of the online world, the current laws that cover protections to citizen’s privacy and bodies, do not always cover the entirety of their personhood online, thus allowing for surveillance. The widespread digital policing has serious implications for Black and Brown youth’s lives in terms of the carceral system, as communities of color are socially construed/presented to be problematic sites or “digital hoods.” ‘Patrols’ of activities (including but not limited to liking/commenting on a post) can land an individual on the NYPD gang database. This database disproportionately patrols and targets communities of color: with only 1.1% of the people on the gang database are White, with 66% Black and 31.7% Latinx, with children as young as 13 years old being added.. To promote inclusivity and reduce racial bias, we recommend policy centered on Restorative Justice principles of community involvement- specifically through social media post analysis, to add layers of interpretation prior to law enforcement surveillance and offline involvement.
March 2021
Abstract
There is currently no passed federal legislation regulating companies creating artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic tools, such as social media e-surveillance tools, facial recognition detection tools, and pre-trial risk assessments. The issue with limited regulation of the deployment of AI technologies is the fact that these algorithms are often biased against people of color, particularly women of color. The job of social work only has a 3% risk of automation, making it the hardest job for robots to do. This is why social work's role in AI development is imperative: social work is not quantifiable, and with collaboration between emerging technologists and social workers, there will be a deeper understanding of justful human connection, and what it means to interface with technology. The tech policy brief discusses the lack of federal regulation regarding emerging tech developments in Artificial Intelligence, and calls for the implementation of social workers within data science spaces.
Mathiyazhagan, Siva, Kleiner, Shana, Patton, Desmond. To Make Good Policy on AI, Talk to Social Workers, March, 2021.
Abstract
The Metaverse is a new combination of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR), and blockchain (Metz, 2021). These technologies will create a virtual world for social connections, entertainment, games, fitness, work, education, and commerce as a digital economy (Snider & Molina, 2021). The main platform companies behind the Metaverse plan for it to become a virtual marketplace, which will require the collection and potential exploitative use of personal data (Wheeler, 2021). It is proven that existing technologies and algorithms are biased and cause digital harm to vulnerable communities (Pilkington, 2019). As a community of social work scientists and mental health practitioners, we are concerned that the Metaverse may amplify social risks, i.e., the addictive nature of algorithms can exacerbate mental health problems in virtual spaces (Karim et al., 2020; McCluskey, 2022). In light of this, there is an urgent need for social work interventions in the virtual world. Social work in the Metaverse would pave a path for racial and mental health equity to prevent possible digital harm. Immediate implementation of the Metaverse in the present non-regulated tech and social condition has the highest potential of amplifying existing social inequalities and mental health challenges in the virtual universe. Therefore, addressing the US federal technology policy gaps with social work principles related to the Metaverse is an urgent priority. This will prevent an exacerbation of existing social and mental health concerns, and the Metaverse may even be used to benefit racial-ethnic minority communities.
Patton, Desmond, Mathiyazhagan, Siva, Landau, Aviv. Meet Them Where They Are: Social Work Informed Considerations for Youth Inclusion in AI Violence Prevention Systems, December 2021.
2020
Desmond Upton Patton
Interactions. 27(2), 86-89. February 2020
Citation
Patton, D. U. (2020). Social work thinking for UX and AI design. Interactions, 27(2), 86-89.
Desmond U. Patton, Philipp Blandfort, William R. Frey, Rossano Schifanella, Kyle McGregor, Shih-Fu U. Chang
Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research. 11(1). February 2020
Abstract
Social media have created a new environmental context for the study of social and human behavior and services. Although social work researchers have become increasingly interested in the use of social media to address social problems, they have been slow to adapt tools that are flexible and convenient for analyzing social media data. They have also given inadequate attention to bias and representation inherent in many multimedia data sets. This article introduces the Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media (VATAS) system, an open-source Web-based platform for labeling or annotating social media data. We use a case study approach, applying VATAS to a study of Chicago, IL, gang-involved youth communication on Twitter to highlight VATAS’ features and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. VATAS is highly customizable, can be privately held on a secure server, and allows for export directly into a CSV file for qualitative, quantitative, and machine-learning analysis. Implications for research using social media sources are noted.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Blandfort, P., Frey, W. R., Schifanella, R., McGregor, K., & Chang, S. F. U. (2020). VATAS: An Open-Source Web Platform for Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 11(1), 000-000.
Desmond U. Patton, William R. Frey, Kyle A. McGregor, Kathleen McKeown, Emanuel Moss
AIES '20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. February 2020
Abstract
While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. This article introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) ap-proach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication. CASM utilizes a team-based approach to analysis of social media data, explicitly informed by community expertise. We use of CASM to analyze Twitter posts from gang-involved youth in Chicago. We designed a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of a support vector machine us-ing CASM hand-labeled posts against a distant model. We found that the CASM-informed hand-labeled data outperforms the baseline distant labels, indicating that the CASM labels capture additional dimensions of information that content-only methods lack. We then question whether this is helpful or harmful for gun violence prevention.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Frey, W. R., McGregor, K. A., Lee, F. T., McKeown, K., & Moss, E. (2020, February). Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 337-342).
Patton, Desmond & Stevens, Robin & Lee, Jocelyn & Eya, Grace-Cecile & Frey, William. (2020). You Set Me Up: Gendered Perceptions of Twitter Communication Among Black Chicago Youth. Social Media + Society. 6.
Abstract
We sought to identify the key dynamics in the relationship between social media and violence by identifying new mechanisms that elucidate how Internet banging becomes offline violence through the perceptions of the Black and Latino boys and men. We conducted 33 interviews with Black and Latino boys and men aged 14–24 who live in Chicago, have experience with gang violence, and are social media users. In our investigation of the use of social media by boys and young men to navigate neighborhood violence, we uncovered a recurring narrative about gender relationships in violence. Male participants often attributed escalations of violence to girls and young women, beginning with online communications that migrated to face-to-face meetings. They described girls and young women as the precipitators of violence through “set-up” meetings that began under the guise of romance, dating, and courtship. This study provides an in-depth examination of how males perceive girls and young women as unique threats to their personal safety, a narrative we must engage with in order to further current violence prevention efforts. Future research is needed to examine the lived experiences of young women, their experience with and exposure to social media-related gang violence, and their view of social media behaviors of men that may lead to violence.
Patton, Desmond, Pyrooz, David, Decker, Scott, Frey, William, Leonard, Patrick. Author Correction: When Twitter Fingers Turn to Trigger Fingers: a Qualitative Study of Social Media-Related Gang Violence, International Journal of Bullying Prevention, June 2022.
Sodhi, Aparna, Aguilar, Nathan, Choma, Deanna, Steve, Jackie, Patton, Desmond, Crandall, Marie. Social Media Representations of Law Enforcement within Four Diverse Chicago Neighborhoods. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, July 2020.
Hollingsworth, Leslie, Patton, Desmond, Allen, Phylicia, Johnson, Kimson. Racial microaggressions in social work education: Black students’ encounters in a predominantly White institution, September 2020.
Elsaesser, Caitlin & Patton, Desmond & Weinstein, Emily & Santiago, Jacqueline & Clarke, Ayesha & Eschmann, Rob, December, 2020. Small becomes big, fast: Adolescent perceptions of how social media features escalate online conflict to offline violence. Children and Youth Services Review. 122.
Abstract
While youth violence is a longstanding problem, social media has changed how youth experience conflict. Qualitative work documents that threats are now being expressed online and escalate to offline violence, in a phenomenon termed internet banging. The goal of the present study was to examine adolescent perceptions of how social media features escalate conflict to offline fights in a sample of adolescents living in disinvested neighborhoods in Hartford. To explore this topic, we foreground adolescent voices to document 1) what adolescents see as the sources of conflict online, and 2) how adolescents see social media features (e.g., photos, comments, livestream video) in escalating conflict online. We draw on Nesi et al.’s (2018a, 2018b) transformational framework and Phenomenality and Ecological Systems Theory (Spencer et al., 1995) to guide our understanding of the role of these features in this form of interpersonal peer conflict. Four focus groups with 41 American adolescents (ages 12 to 19, 73% self-identified as Black) solicited strategies to prevent violence resulting from social media conflict. Three coders analyzed data in Dedoose, guided by systematic textual coding using a multi-step thematic analysis. Major findings underscore that adolescents described romantic conflict as a significant source of social media fights that lead to offline violence, particularly for conflict involving girls. Further, our findings underscore that adolescents engaged in social media threats often do not go online with the intention to fight. Rather, adolescents expressed keen awareness that social media intensifies interpersonal slights, and specifically identified video streaming and comments as social media features that intensify social media threats, increasing the likelihood of offline violence.
2019
Ruiqi Zhong, Yanda Chen, Desmond Patton, Charlotte Selous, Kathy McKeown
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 4765–4775,. November 2019
Abstract
Gang-involved youth in cities such as Chicago sometimes post on social media to express their aggression towards rival gangs and previous research has demonstrated that a deep learning approach can predict aggression and loss in posts. To address the possibility of bias in this sensitive application, we developed an approach to systematically interpret the state of the art model. We found, surprisingly, that it frequently bases its predictions on stop words such as “a” or “on”, an approach that could harm social media users who have no aggressive intentions. To tackle this bias, domain experts annotated the rationales, highlighting words that explain why a tweet is labeled as “aggression.” These new annotations enable us to quantitatively measure how justified the model predictions are, and build models that drastically reduce bias. Our study shows that in high stake scenarios, accuracy alone cannot guarantee a good system and we need new evaluation methods.
Desmond U. Patton, William R. Frey, Michael Gaskell, Palgrave Communications. 5(1), 1-8. October 2019
Abstract
How should we interpret gun images on social media? Take for example the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School. Media articles revealed that the gunman, a white adolescent male, posted images of firearms and other weapons on his social media profile prior to the shooting. On the other hand, when it comes to Black communities, digital policing strategies often intercept images with guns and individuals thought to be associated with gangs before a crime is ever committed. In this study, we use a mixed methods approach, situated in social systems theory, to make meaning of gun posting behavior among Black youth who associate with gangs in Chicago. We collected and examined a corpus of Twitter images (1851) through snowball sampling of a well-known deceased gang member in Chicago and users in their Twitter network. We identified 560 images that contain guns and asked two distinct groups to annotate images: formerly gang-involved outreach workers, known as community domain experts, at a local Chicago violence prevention organization and Master of Social Work students at Columbia University. After comparing their results, findings highlighted the prevalence and frequency of gun image posting within this corpus and critical differences in how community domain experts and social work annotators perceive guns. The various underlying intents provide a rich source of knowledge for understanding the symbolic nature of guns in the digital age.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Frey, W. R., & Gaskell, M. (2019). Guns on social media: complex interpretations of gun images posted by Chicago youth. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-8.
Philipp Blandfort, Desmond U. Patton, William R. Frey, Svebor Karaman, Surabhi Bhargava, Fei-Tzin Lee, Siddharth Varia, Chris Kedzie, Michael B. Gaskell, Rossano Schifanella, Kathleen McKeown, Shih-Fu Chang. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-2019). June 2019
Abstract
Gang violence is a severe issue in major cities across the U.S. and recent studies [Patton et al. 2017] have found evidence of social media communications that can be linked to such violence in communities with high rates of exposure to gang activity. In this paper we partnered computer scientists with social work researchers, who have domain expertise in gang violence, to analyze how public tweets with images posted by youth who mention gang associations on Twitter can be leveraged to automatically detect psychosocial factors and conditions that could potentially assist social workers and violence outreach workers in prevention and early intervention programs. To this end, we developed a rigorous methodology for collecting and annotating tweets. We gathered 1,851 tweets and accompanying annotations related to visual concepts and the psychosocial codes: aggression, loss, and substance use. These codes are relevant to social work interventions, as they represent possible pathways to violence on social media. We compare various methods for classifying tweets into these three classes, using only the text of the tweet, only the image of the tweet, or both modalities as input to the classifier. In particular, we analyze the usefulness of mid-level visual concepts and the role of different modalities for this tweet classification task. Our experiments show that individually, text information dominates classification performance of the loss class, while image information dominates the aggression and substance use classes. Our multimodal approach provides a very promising improvement (18% relative in mean average precision) over the best single modality approach. Finally, we also illustrate the complexity of understanding social media data and elaborate on open challenges.
Citation
Blandfort, P., Patton, D., Frey, W. R., Karaman, S., Bhargava, S., Lee, F. T., ... & McKeown, K. (2018). Multimodal Social Media Analysis for Gang Violence Prevention. arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.08465.
Desmond U. Patton, David Pyrooz, Scott Decker, William R. Frey, Patrick Leonard. International Journal of Bullying Prevention. pp. 1-13. March 2019.
Abstract
Mounting evidence suggests that social media can exacerbate tensions among gangs that ultimately lead to violence, but serious questions remain about precisely how conflict online translates to conflict offline. The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which gang violence can be mediated by the Internet. We conducted a sociolinguistic study with 17 Black males between the ages of 14–24 who self-identified at the time of the study as having current or former gang involvement to determine how online provocations may generate offline violence. We examine the sociolinguistic patterns of two prominent gangs on Chicago’s South Side and use qualitative interviews and a vignette methodology to gather in-depth information into the nature of Internet-mediated gang violence from multiple perspectives. We identified three forms of social media communication that were interpreted as threating by participants: dissing, calling, and direct threats. We developed a framework for understanding participant responses to tweets and the potential for violence that is a consequence of such posts. Lastly, we highlight racial decoding and importance of context when interpreting the social media communication of Black and Latino youth. This study has important implications for the prevention of gang violence that is amplified by social media communication. Findings can be used to initiate conversations between researchers and practitioners regarding the role of social media for prevention and the ethical use of such tools, particularly for marginalized populations.
Desmond U. Patton, Philipp Blandfort, William R. Frey, Svebor Karaman, Michael Gaskell. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019. January 2019.
Abstract
Researchers in computer science have spent considerable time developing methods to increase the accuracy and richness of annotations. However, there is a dearth in research that examines the positionality of the annotator, how they are trained and what we can learn from disagreements between different groups of annotators. In this study, we use qualitative analysis, statistical and computational methods to compare annotations between Chicago-based domain experts and graduate students who annotated a total of 1,851 tweets with images that are a part of a larger corpora associated with the Chicago Gang Intervention Study, which aims to develop a computational system that detects aggression and loss among gang-involved youth in Chicago. We found evidence to support the study of disagreement between annotators and underscore the need for domain expertise when reviewing Twitter data from vulnerable populations. Implications for annotation and content moderation are discussed.
Citation
Patton, D.U., Blandfort, P., Frey, W.R., Karaman, S., & Gaskell, M. (2019). Annotating social media data from vulnerable populations: Evaluating disagreement between domain experts and graduate student annotators. 2019 Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS-52), Honolulu, Hawaii
2018
Serina Chang, Ruiqi Zhong, Ethan Adams, Fei-Tzin Lee, Siddharth Varia, Desmond Patton, William Frey, Chris Kedzie, Kathy McKeown. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. October 2018.
Abstract
Gang-involved youth in cities such as Chicago have increasingly turned to social media to post about their experiences and intents online. In some situations, when they experience the loss of a loved one, their online expression of emotion may evolve into aggression towards rival gangs and ultimately into real-world violence. In this paper, we present a novel system for detecting Aggression and Loss in social media. Our system features the use of domain specific resources automatically derived from a large unlabeled corpus, and contextual representations of the emotional and semantic content of the user’s recent tweets as well as their interactions with other users. Incorporating context in our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) leads to a significant improvement.
Citation
Chang, S., Zhong, R., Adams, E., Lee, F. T., Varia, S., Patton, D., ... & McKeown, K. (2018). Detecting Gang-Involved Escalation on Social Media Using Context. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 46-56).
William R. Frey. Biomedical Informatics Insights. 10. August 2018
Abstract
As the lives of young people expand further into digital spaces, our understandings of their expressions and language on social media become more consequential for providing individualized and applicable mental health resources. This holds true for young people exposed to high rates of community violence who may also lack access to health resources offline. Social media may provide insights into the impacts of community violence exposure on mental health. However, much of what is shared on social media contains localized language and context, which poses challenges regarding interpretation. In this perspective, I offer insights gained from the Beyond the Bullets: The Complexities and Ethical Challenges of Interpreting Social Media Posts workshop during the Digital Interventions in Mental Health conference in London, England: (1) social media as an underutilized environmental context in mental health services; (2) interpreting the meaning of social media posts is challenging, and there are additional challenges when users are exposed to offline violence and (3) the importance of having various perspectives when interpreting social media posts to build contextually nuanced and theoretically based understandings of digital social behavior.
Citation
Frey, W. R. (2018). Humanizing digital mental health through social media: centering experiences of gang-involved youth exposed to high rates of violence. Biomedical informatics insights, 10, 1178222618797076.
William R. Frey, Desmond U. Patton, Michael B. Gaskell, Kyle A. McGregor, Social Science Computer Review. July 2018
Abstract
Mining social media data for studying the human condition has created new and unique challenges. When analyzing social media data from marginalized communities, algorithms lack the ability to accurately interpret off-line context, which may lead to dangerous assumptions about and implications for marginalized communities. To combat this challenge, we hired formerly gang-involved young people as domain experts for contextualizing social media data in order to create inclusive, community-informed algorithms. Utilizing data from the Gang Intervention and Computer Science Project—a comprehensive analysis of Twitter data from gang-involved youth in Chicago—we describe the process of involving formerly gang-involved young people in developing a new part-of-speech tagger and content classifier for a prototype natural language processing system that detects aggression and loss in Twitter data. We argue that involving young people as domain experts leads to more robust understandings of context, including localized language, culture, and events. These insights could change how data scientists approach the development of corpora and algorithms that affect people in marginalized communities and who to involve in that process. We offer a contextually driven interdisciplinary approach between social work and data science that integrates domain insights into the training of qualitative annotators and the production of algorithms for positive social impact.
Citation
Frey, W. R., Patton, D. U., Gaskell, M. B., & McGregor, K. A. (2018). Artificial intelligence and inclusion: Formerly gang-involved youth as domain experts for analyzing unstructured twitter data. Social Science Computer Review, 0894439318788314.
Desmond Upton Patton, Jamie MacBeth, Sarita Schoenebeck, Katherine Shear, Kathleen McKeown. Biomedical Informatics Insights. 10. April 2018
Abstract
There is a dearth of research investigating youths’ experience of grief and mourning after the death of close friends or family. Even less research has explored the question of how youth use social media sites to engage in the grieving process. This study employs qualitative analysis and natural language processing to examine tweets that follow 2 deaths. First, we conducted a close textual read on a sample of tweets by Gakirah Barnes, a gang-involved teenaged girl in Chicago, and members of her Twitter network, over a 19-day period in 2014 during which 2 significant deaths occurred: that of Raason “Lil B” Shaw and Gakirah’s own death. We leverage the grief literature to understand the way Gakirah and her peers express thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at the time of these deaths. We also present and explain the rich and complex style of online communication among gang-involved youth, one that has been overlooked in prior research. Next, we overview the natural language processing output for expressions of loss and grief in our data set based on qualitative findings and present an error analysis on its output for grief. We conclude with a call for interdisciplinary research that analyzes online and offline behaviors to help understand physical and emotional violence and other problematic behaviors prevalent among marginalized communities.
Citation
Patton, D. U., MacBeth, J., Schoenebeck, S., Shear, K., & McKeown, K. (2018). Accommodating Grief on Twitter: An Analysis of Expressions of Grief Among Gang Involved Youth on Twitter Using Qualitative Analysis and Natural Language Processing. Biomedical informatics insights, 10, 1178222618763155.
Desmond Upton Patton, Jamie MacBeth, Sarita Schoenebeck, Katherine Shear, Kathleen McKeown. Biomedical Informatics Insights. 10. April 2018
Abstract
There is a dearth of research investigating youths’ experience of grief and mourning after the death of close friends or family. Even less research has explored the question of how youth use social media sites to engage in the grieving process. This study employs qualitative analysis and natural language processing to examine tweets that follow 2 deaths. First, we conducted a close textual read on a sample of tweets by Gakirah Barnes, a gang-involved teenaged girl in Chicago, and members of her Twitter network, over a 19-day period in 2014 during which 2 significant deaths occurred: that of Raason “Lil B” Shaw and Gakirah’s own death. We leverage the grief literature to understand the way Gakirah and her peers express thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at the time of these deaths. We also present and explain the rich and complex style of online communication among gang-involved youth, one that has been overlooked in prior research. Next, we overview the natural language processing output for expressions of loss and grief in our data set based on qualitative findings and present an error analysis on its output for grief. We conclude with a call for interdisciplinary research that analyzes online and offline behaviors to help understand physical and emotional violence and other problematic behaviors prevalent among marginalized communities.
Citation
Patton, D. U., MacBeth, J., Schoenebeck, S., Shear, K., & McKeown, K. (2018). Accommodating Grief on Twitter: An Analysis of Expressions of Grief Among Gang Involved Youth on Twitter Using Qualitative Analysis and Natural Language Processing. Biomedical informatics insights, 10, 1178222618763155.
Desmond Upton Patton, Kyle McGregor, Gary Slutkin. Youth Gun Violence Prevention in a Digital Age. March 2018
Abstract
Gakirah Barnes, a 17-year old who publicly claimed affiliation with a well-known Chicago gang, was killed just 3 blocks from her home in 2014. She had revealed her address in real time on social media, which directed the perpetrators to her exact location. Her Twitter account revealed a road map of clues about the trauma she endured and her own engagement in violence. Her online history included direct and indirect threats toward known rival gangs, boastful discussions of the perpetration of past violence, images and videos of her with semiautomatic handguns, and countless expressions of loss and grief. Although it is evident that Gakirah’s Twitter posts played a role in her killing, could the same social media information have been used to prevent her death?
Citation
Patton, D. U., McGregor, K., & Slutkin, G. (2018). Youth Gun Violence Prevention in a Digital Age. Pediatrics, e20172438. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2017-2438
2017
Desmond U. Patton, Sadiq Patel, Jun Sung Hong, Megan L. Ranney, Marie Crandall, Lyle Dungy. Tweets, Gangs, and Guns: A Snapshot of Gang Communications in Detroit. October 2017
Abstract
The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of violent and criminal Twitter communications among gang-affiliated individuals in Detroit, Michigan. We analyzed 8.5 million Detroit gang members’ tweets from January 2013 to March 2014 to assess whether they contained Internet banging–related keywords. We found that 4.7% of gang- affiliated user tweets consisted of terms related to violence and crime. Violence and crime-related communications fell into 4 main categories: (a) beefing (267,221 tweets), (b) grief (79,971 tweets), (c) guns (3,551 tweets), and (d) substance use and distribution (47,638 tweets). Patterns in violent and criminal communication that may be helpful in predicting future gang activities were identified, which has implications for violence prevention research, practice, and policy.
Citation
Patton, D. U., Patel, S., Sung Hong, J., Ranney, M. L., Crandall, M., & Dungy, L. (2017). Tweets, gangs, and guns: a snapshot of gang communications in detroit. Violence and victims.
Desmond Upton Patton, Douglas-Wade Brunton, Andrea Dixon, Reuben Jonathan Miller, Patrick Leonard, Rose Hackman. Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations. September 2017
Abstract
Police are increasingly monitoring social media to build evidence for criminal indictments. In 2014, 103 alleged gang members residing in public housing in Harlem, New York, were arrested in what has been called “the largest gang bust in history.” The arrests came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) spent 4 years monitoring the social media communication of these suspected gang members. In this article, we explore the implications of using social media for the identification of criminal activity. We describe everyday racism in digital policing as a burgeoning conceptual framework for understanding racialized social media surveillance by law enforcement. We discuss implications for law enforcement agencies utilizing social media data for intelligence and evidence in criminal cases.
Citation
Patton, D.U., Brunton, D.W., Dixon, A., Miller, R.J., Leonard, P., & Hackman, R. (2017) Stop and frisk online: theorizing everyday racism in digital policing in the use of social media for identification of criminal conduct and associations, Social Media + Society, 3(3).
Caitlin Elsaesser, Beth Russell, Christine McCauley Ohannessian, Desmond U. Patton, Aggression and Violent Behavior. 35:62-72. July 2017
Abstract
While parents have a critical influence on reducing adolescent risk taking, adolescents' access to online spaces presents significant and novel challenges to parents' ability to reduce their youth's involvement in cyberbullying. The present study reviews the existing literature on parents' influence (i.e., parental warmth and parental monitoring) on adolescent cyberbullying, both as victims and perpetrators. 23 mostly cross sectional articles were identified for this review. Findings indicate that parental warmth is consistently associated with lower cyberbullying, both as victims and perpetrators. For parental monitoring, strategies that are focused on parental control, such as restricting the Internet, appear to be only weakly related to youth's involvement in cyberbullying victimization and perpetration. In contrast, strategies that are more collaborative with in nature (e.g., evaluative mediation and co-use) are more closely connected to cyberbullying victimization and perpetration, although evidence suggests that the effectiveness of these practices varies by sex and ethnicity. Results underscore the need for parents to provide emotional warmth that might support adolescent's disclosure of online activity. Implications for practice and future research are reviewed.
Desmond Upton Patton, Patrick Leonard, Robert D. Eschmann, Sadiq Patel, Caitlin Elsaesser, Shantel Crosby, Youth & Society. July 2017
Abstract
Youth living in violent urban neighborhoods increasingly post messages online from urban street corners. The decline of the digital divide and the proliferation of social media platforms connect youth to peer communities who may share experiences with neighborhood stress and trauma. Social media can also be used for targeted retribution when threats and insults are directed at individuals or groups. Recent research suggests that gang-involved youth may use social media to brag, post fight videos, insult, and threaten—a phenomenon termed Internet banging. In this article, we leverage “code of the digital street” to understand how and in what ways social media facilitates urban-based youth violence. We utilize qualitative interviews from 33 Black and Latino young men who frequent violence prevention programs and live in violent neighborhoods in Chicago. Emerging themes describe how and why online threats are conceptualized on social media. Implications for violence prevention and criminal investigations are discussed.
2016
Terra Blevins, Robert Kwiatkowski, Jamie C. Macbeth, Kathleen McKeown, Desmond Upton Patton, Owen Rambow. To be published: The International Conference for Computational Linguistics. October 2016
Abstract
Violence is a serious problems for cities like Chicago and has been exacerbated by the use of social media by gang-involved youths for taunting rival gangs. We present a corpus of tweets from a young and powerful female gang member and her communicators, which we have annotated with discourse intention, using a deep read to understand how and what triggered conversations to escalate into aggression. We use this corpus to develop a part-of-speech tagger and phrase table for the variant of English that is used and a classifier for identifying tweets that express grieving and aggression.
Desmond Upton Patton, Kathleen McKeown, Owen Rambow, Jamie Macbeth, Bloomberg Data For Good Exchange Conference. September 2016
Abstract
The U.S. has the highest rate of firearm-related deaths when compared to other industrialized countries. Violence particularly affects low income, urban neighborhoods in cities like Chicago, which saw a 40% increase in firearm violence from 2014 to 2015 to more than 3,000 shooting victims. While recent studies have found that urban, gang-involved individuals curate a unique and complex communication style within and between social media platforms, organizations focused on reducing gang violence are struggling to keep up with the growing complexity of social media platforms and the sheer volume of data they present. In this paper, describe the Digital Urban Violence Analysis Approach (DUVVA), a collaborative qualitative analysis method used in a collaboration between data scientists and social work researchers to develop a suite of systems for decoding the high- stress language of urban, gang-involved youth. Our approach leverages principles of grounded theory when analyzing approximately 800 tweets posted by Chicago gang members and participation of youth from Chicago neighborhoods to create a language resource for natural language processing (NLP) methods. In uncovering the unique language and communication style, we developed automated tools with the potential to detect aggressive language on social media and aid individuals and groups in performing violence prevention and interruption.
Tyreasa Washington, Theda Rose, Stephanie Irby Coard, Desmond Upton Patton, Shelton Young, Sasha Giles, Marlon Nolen, Child & Youth Care Forum. 1-20. September 2016
Abstract
Background
The reported prevalence of depression and anxiety among African American children and adolescents and their negative sequalae suggest a need to further explore factors that may be protective of depression and anxiety among this population.
Objective
The aim of this review was to examine empirical studies that focus on the association between family-level factors (e.g., parenting practices, family functioning) and depression and anxiety in African American children. Specifically, we examined the studies’ characteristics and the relationship between various family-level factors and depression and anxiety outcomes and assessed the methodological quality of studies.
Methods
This review was guided by systematic review methods postulated by Gough and colleagues and the Prisma Group. Electronic databases searched were Social Work Abstracts, PsycINFO, SocIndex, PubMed, Social Service Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts. Thirty-one studies published from 2003 to 2014 were included and assessed for methodological strength using the Quantitative Research Assessment Tool.
Results
The majority of the study samples were low income and resided in metropolitan or urban areas, and primary caregivers were female. Parenting practices (58 % of studies) were by far the most frequently examined family-level factor associated with depression and anxiety.
Conclusion
Positive family-level factors (e.g., positive parenting, healthy family functioning and environment) was associated with decreased depression and anxiety. Findings from this review can inform the development or adaptation of family-based interventions that can effectively reduce depression and anxiety symptoms in African American children.
Desmond U. Patton, Reuben J. Miller, James Garbarino, Adrian Gale, Emma Kornfeld, Journal of Community Psychology. 44.5: 638–655. June 2016
Abstract
Youth exposure to violence, criminal activities and deviant peer affiliation may impact overall development and the transition into adulthood. Low income African American youth are disproportionately exposed to chronic stressors, but little is known about how they conceptualize challenges and success once they enter adulthood. We examine how low incomes African Americans reflect on exposure to chronic stressors during adolescence that impact their description of challenges and successes in emerging adulthood. We interviewed thirteen African American males and females who are former participants of Chicago Youth Programs. Participants identified three challenges: neighborhood violence, familial stress and financial instability as barriers to success in emerging adulthood. Participants identified conditions that facilitated success in emerging adulthood: perseverance and access to Chicago Youth Programs. Understanding challenges and successes associated with emerging adulthood for low-income African Americans may lead to better informed support services for low income African Americans across the life course.
Desmond Upton Patton, Robert D. Eschmann, Caitlin Elsaesser, Eddie Bocanegra, Computers in Human Behavior. Vol 65. June 2016
Abstract
Recent research has identified a relatively new trend among youth (12e24) living in violent urban neighborhoods. These youth use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to brag about violence, make threats, recruit gang members and to plan criminal activity known as Internet banging. Studies have typically examined youth communication by mining data on social media and surveying or interviewing youth about their social media behaviors. However, there is little to no empirical research that examines how adults who work directly with youth in violent, urban neighborhoods shape, conceptualize and intervene in urban-based youth violence facilitated by social media. Utilizing qualitative interviews with violence outreach workers, we asked outreach workers to describe how youth use social media and the extent to which they use social media to intervene in crisis that emerge in violent Chicago neighborhoods. Participants describe youth behavior that included taunting rival gangs, posturing and boasting about violent events. We also found evidence that social media enhanced crisis intervention work in violent neighborhoods when coupled with close, trusting relationships with youth.
Daphne C. Watkins, Desmond U. Patton, Reuben J. Miller, The Journal of Men's Studies. 24.2: 119-129. April 2016
Abstract
This introduction to the special issue will ground our understanding of the current state of Black boys and men in America, nearly 2 years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Each of these articles represents the voices of scholars whose influences add clarity to the experiences and aftermath of traumatic events that threaten the safety and well-being of Black boys and men. Collectively, these articles showcase various research methods; address individual, family, and community issues; and demonstrate how race, gender, and class influence how the assorted levels of society interact with Black males. This special issue is an important contribution to raising awareness of and enacting social change for Black boys and men in our nation.
Desmond U. Patton, Jeffrey Lane, Patrick Leonard, Jamie Macbeth, Jocelyn R. Smith-Lee, New Media & Society. January 2016
Abstract
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social media platforms like Twitter. We examine the Twitter communications of one known female gang member, Gakirah Barnes, during a two week window in which her friend was killed and then weeks later, she was also killed. We explore how street culture is translated online through the conventions of Twitter. We find that a salient script of reciprocal violence within a local network is written online in real time. Those writing this script anticipate, direct, historicize, and mourn neighborhood violence.
Desmond Upton Patton, Patrick Leonard, Loren Cahill, Jamie Macbeth, Chantel Crosby, Douglas-Wade Brunton, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Vol 26, Issue 3-4. January 2016
Abstract
The hostile and adversarial relationship between youth and police in urban settings has remained pervasive and persistent for centuries. This is a tension historically rooted in the miasma of lack of trust; racial, ethnic, and cultural differences; and fear, anger, and hostility from racialized surveillance and policing. Indeed, most Black youth have little contact with police unless it involves harsh profiling and/or criminalization. In this article, we leverage the policing literature to examine how the perpetual detestation between urban youth and police is expressed in physical and digital contexts (e.g., Twitter). We find that urban youth, particularly gang-involved youth, publicly articulate their disdain for law enforcement agents on Twitter. The young people in our study expressed chronic grief and anger after the fatal police shooting of a Southside Chicago gang member. Further, they expressed a strong desire to violently retaliate against the Chicago Police Department after their friend was killed. In fact, users on Twitter frequently posted the hash tag #CPDK—an acronym for Chicago Police Department Killer—shortly after this incident. We discuss the implications of using Twitter data to inform policing practices, as well as early intervention and prevention strategies for youth living in inner cities.
Jocelyn R. Smith, Desmond U. Patton, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 86.2: 212-223. January 2016
Abstract
Concentrated disadvantage in urban communities places young Black men at disproportionate risk for exposure to violence and trauma. Homicide, a health disparity, positions Black males vulnerable to premature violent death and traumatic loss, particularly when peers are murdered. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been demonstrated as a health consequence for middle-income and White homicide survivors; however, understandings of traumatic stress among young Black men situated in contexts of chronic violence exposure remains limited. Guided by phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST), the current study used in-depth qualitative interviews (average length: 90 min) to examine the presence and expression of traumatic stress symptoms among 37 young Black men (18–24) in Baltimore who experienced the homicide death of a loved one. Participants were recruited over 18 months through fieldwork at a large organization that serves Baltimore youth and young adults. Confidential participant interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, coded, and analyzed in ATLAS.ti. Pseudonyms were assigned to all participants. More than 70% of participants reported experiencing 2 or more Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM–V)–defined posttraumatic stress symptoms. Hypervigilance was most frequently experienced and expressed as being on point. Findings identify the prevalence of traumatic stress symptoms among young Black men in urban contexts; identify contextually specific expressions of traumatic stress; and, present implications for the mental health and clinical treatment of Black males living in environments where no “post” exists.
2015
Desmond U. Patton, Ninive Sanchez, Dale Fitch, Jamie Macbeth, Patrick Leonard, Social Science Computer Review. December 2015
Abstract
Trauma-based interventions are common in mental health practice, and yet there is a gap in services because social media has created new ways of managing trauma. Practitioners identify treatments for traumatic experiences and are trained to implement evidence-based practices, but there is limited research that uses social media as a data source. We use a case study to explore over 400 Twitter communications of a gang member in Chicago’s Southside, Gakirah Barnes, who mourned the death of her friend on Twitter. We further explore how, following her own death, members of her Twitter network mourn her. We describe expressions of trauma that are difficult to uncover in traditional trauma-based services. We discuss practice and research implications regarding using Twitter to address trauma among gang-involved youth.
Desmond Upton Patton, Jun Sung Hong, Sadiq Patel, Michael J. Kral, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. June 2015
Abstract
School bullying and victimization are serious social problems in schools. Most empirical studies on bullying and peer victimization are quantitative and examine the prevalence of bullying, associated risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes. Conversely, there is limited qualitative research on the experiences of children and adolescents related to school bullying and victimization. We review qualitative research on school bullying and victimization published between 2004 and 2014. Twenty-four empirical research studies using qualitative methods were reviewed. We organize the findings from these studies into (1) emic, (2) context specific, (3) iterative, (4) power relations, and (5) naturalistic inquiry. We find that qualitative researchers have focused on elaborating on and explicating the experiences of bully perpetrators, victims, and bystanders in their own words. Directions for research and practice are also discussed.
Reuben Jonathan Miller, Desmond Patton, Ed-Dee Williams, Offender Programs Report. 19.1: 1-16. June 2015
Abstract
Jail and prison populations in the United States have increased fivefold between 1975 and 2001, exceeding 2.4 million by their peak year in 2007 (West & Sabol, 2008). Even after modest annual declines in recent years (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013), there are still over 2.2 million prisoners in the United States, which has the distinction of incarcerating more of its residents than any other nation in the history of the modern world (Clear & Frost, 2013). The populations of prisons and jails are disproportionately composed of poor racial and ethnic minorities. We know, for example, that Blacks and Latinos represent 30% of the U.S. population, but 59% of all U.S. prisoners (Carson, 2014). Further complicating matters, prisoners suffer from long-term illnesses and communicable diseases, are chronically unemployed, and face serious barriers to community reintegration, including addiction, chronic poverty, housing instability, mental health issues, and exclusion from full social, civic, and economic participation (Burch, 2013; Clear & Frost, 2013; Dumont et al., 2012; James & Glaze, 2006; Petersilia, 2003; Street, 2003).
2014
Jun Sung Hong, Hui Huang, Meghan Golden, Desmond Patton, Tyreasa Washington, Residential Treatment for Children & Youth. 31.4. September 2014
Abstract
Numerous studies have documented a direct association between children’s exposure to community violence and subsequent delinquent behavior. Regrettably, an understanding of the community violence exposure-delinquent behavior link is incomplete because violence-exposed children rarely engage in delinquency immediately. Rather, there are complex, developmental pathways in which these children experience behavioral problems before subsequently exhibiting delinquent behavior. Despite the importance of understanding the mechanisms that illuminate how children exposed to violence in the community might engage in delinquency, relatively few studies have investigated potential mechanisms. This review proposes four potential mechanisms: depression, anxiety/PTSD, conduct disorder, and aggression. More specifically, we examine how certain internalizing and externalizing behaviors can potentially mediate the relationship between community violence exposure and delinquent behavior. We also discuss implications for residential treatment research and practice.
Desmond Upton Patton, Jun Sung Hong, Megan Ranney, Sadiq Patel, Caitlin Kelley, Rob Eschmann, Tyreasa Washington, Computers in Human Behavior. 35: 548–553. June 2014
Abstract
Numerous studies have documented a direct association between children’s exposure to community violence and subsequent delinquent behavior. Regrettably, an understanding of the community violence exposure-delinquent behavior link is incomplete because violence-exposed children rarely engage in delinquency immediately. Rather, there are complex, developmental pathways in which these children experience behavioral problems before subsequently exhibiting delinquent behavior. Despite the importance of understanding the mechanisms that illuminate how children exposed to violence in the community might engage in delinquency, relatively few studies have investigated potential mechanisms. This review proposes four potential mechanisms: depression, anxiety/PTSD, conduct disorder, and aggression. More specifically, we examine how certain internalizing and externalizing behaviors can potentially mediate the relationship between community violence exposure and delinquent behavior. We also discuss implications for residential treatment research and practice.
2013
Desmond Upton Patton, Robert D. Eschmann, Dirk A. Butler, Computers in Human Behavior. 29.5: A54-A59. September 2013
Abstract
Gang members carry guns and twitter accounts. Media outlets nationally have reported on a new phenomenon of gang affiliates using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to trade insults or make violence threats that lead homicide or victimization. We term this interaction internet banging. Police departments in metropolitan areas have increased resources in their gang violence units to combat this issue. Interestingly, there is little to no literature on this issue. We argue internet banging is a cultural phenomenon that has evolved from increased participation with social media and represents an adaptive structuration, or new and unintended use of existing online social media. We examine internet banging within the context of gang violence, paying close attention to the mechanisms and processes that may explain how and why internet banging has evolved. We examine the role of hip-hop in the development of internet banging and highlight the changing roles of both hip hop and computer mediated communication as social representations of life in violent communities. We explore the presentation of urban masculinity and its influence on social media behavior. Lastly, we conduct a textual analysis of music and video content that demonstrates violent responses to virtual interactions.
Desmond Upton Patton, Jun Sung Hong, Abigail B. Williams, Paula Allen-Meares, Educational Psychology Review. 25.2: 245–260. June 2013
Abstract
School bullying and peer victimization are social problems that affect African American youth across various environmental contexts. Regrettably, many of the empirical research on bullying and peer victimization among African American youth has examined individual and direct level influences in silos rather than a constellation of factors occurring in multiple settings, such as home, school, and neighborhood. As a holistic model, the social–ecological framework provides a context with which to situate and interpret findings and draw implications from a broader psychosocial framework, which can be applicable across various systems. We utilize Bronfenbrenner’s (American Psychologist 32:513–531, 1977) social–ecological framework as a springboard for investigating the accumulation of risk contributors and the presences of protective factors in relation to school bullying and peer victimization of African American youth. More specifically, we examine the risk and protective factors occurring in the micro- (i.e., parents, peers, school, and community), exo- (i.e., parental stress), and macrosystem levels (i.e., hypermasculinity, and gender role beliefs and stereotypes). We then discuss implications for research and school-based practice.