HOPE Social Media Intervention for HIV Testing and Studying Social Networks

University of California Irvine (UCI)

Status

Completed

Conditions

HIV

Treatments

Behavioral: social media intervention

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

NIH

Identifiers

NCT02944877

1R01MH106415 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

20205768

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study [HOPE: Harnessing Online Peer Education] seeks to determine the efficacy of using online social networks to scale peer community leader models to increase HIV prevention within African-American and Latino men who have sex with men. The peer community leader model, which teaches community popular opinion leaders about how to disseminate behavior changes messages throughout the community, has been proven to increase HIV prevention behaviors. Social media and online communities, such as Facebook, may be a cost-effective platform for scaling these models. Primarily upper middle-class White populations used the Internet in its early years, however, Internet use within African-American and Latino households has recently increased dramatically, especially on social media. People using the Internet may be at the highest risk for contracting HIV and are using novel Internet approaches to find sex partners, such as through social media. This is the first study to examine the effectiveness of the HOPE social media intervention to increase HIV testing among at-risk groups in the United States.

Enrollment

900 patients

Sex

Male

Ages

18 to 89 years old

Volunteers

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

18 years of age or older
Male
Sexually active with another man in the last 12 months
Willing and capable of understanding and assenting to an online informed consent form
Has (or willing to create) a social media page.

Exclusion criteria