“ … it’s almost therapeutic, right? Because it’s almost like that session that I never had”: gay men’s accounts of being a participant in HIV research

ABSTRACT

Limited research has explored how gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men describe the impact of their involvement in HIV and sexual health research. We enrolled 166 gay and bisexual men who tested HIV-negative at a community sexual health clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, into a year-long mixed methods study. Thirty-three of these participants who reported recent condomless anal intercourse were purposively recruited into an embedded qualitative study. Analysis revealed rich accounts of the self-described, interrelated impacts of study participation: (1) pride in contribution and community involvement (e.g., as a rationale for enrolment and an outcome of participation); (2) how one thinks about sexual behaviours and partnerships (e.g., encouraging reflection on the types and amount of sex they have had; in some cases the methods of quantitative data collection were said to have produced feelings of guilt or shame); and (3) experiencing research as a form of counselling (e.g., qualitative interviews were experienced as having a major therapeutic component to them). Our analysis underscores the importance of researchers being reflexive regarding how study participation in HIV research may impact participants, including unintended emotional and behavioural impacts.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed methods research
• HIV/AIDS
• gay men
• research participation
• counselling
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all of the men who volunteered to take part in this research and the entire Canadian Institutes of Health Research Team in the Study of Acute HIV Infection in Gay Men. We acknowledge the valuable contributions of our community partners, including Positive Living Society of BC and Health Initiative for Men.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Social desirability (i.e., wanting to make the interviewer feel good and to be perceived as someone who wanted to help others) may have impacted the some of the qualitative narratives used in this analysis. For a detailed discussion of interview and analysis methods, as well as an overview of study limitations, please see Grace et al. (2014). All interviews were completed in a private room in the gay men’s sexual health clinic where recruitment took place. Participants received an honorarium of $25 CDN for each study component (i.e., quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews). Ethics approval was obtained from the University of British Columbia Research Ethics Board.

2. These opportunities may offer both outlets for men to contribute to the health of their communities as well as the chance to build friendships and social networks to support their own mental, social, sexual and physical health. While civic participation and increased social capital (Bourdieu, 1986) have been associated with recall of health messages (Viswanath, Steele, & Finnegan Jr, 2006) and improved individual-level health outcomes (Rocco & Suhrcke, 2012) in some research to date, the extent to which gay men’s involvement in the work of LGBT organisations results in protective factors related to sexual risk in the Canadian context is unclear (Muriuki, Fendrich, Pollack, & Lippert, 2011). For example, the work of our community partner Health Initiative for Men was noted by the number of study participants (http://checkhimout.ca/).

3. One approach, employed in our study with HIV-positive gay men, was to include a psychologist in our team to help develop an understanding of therapeutic dynamics and the ability to establish boundaries in our interviews (Grace et al., 2015; http://acutehivstudy.com/).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research [Grant no. HET-85520].