Recruiting Adolescents at High-Risk for Contracting HIV through Dating Apps

Background: HIV negative young men who have sex with men (YMSM) and transgender women have been traditionally difficult populations to recruit into prevention studies. ATN CARES is a prevention intervention designed to optimize engagement of these youth ages 12-24 into the HIV prevention continuum. Recruitment efforts were conducted in person at various community organizations and targeted events (e.g., Gay Pride). However, these methods may miss more social-isolated youth who do not seek services or participate in community events. To supplement in-person approaches, ATN CARES – New Orleans began recruiting through gay dating apps (Jack’d, Grindr, Scruff) since April, 2018. We describe our gay dating app recruitment experiences, and examine differences across HIV risk and prevention continuum indicators between HIV negative YMSM and transgender women recruited from dating apps with those from in-person approaches.

Methods: Seven field interviewers were trained on a dating app recruitment protocol, and assigned apps and targeted times and days of the week dedicated to recruitment. Activities were tracked to identify notable recruitment trends. We compare sociodemographic and HIV risk and prevention continuum indicators (e.g., condom use, HIV testing, PrEP awareness) between HIV negative YMSM and transgender women recruited from dating apps (n=64) with those from in-person methods (n=96) using bivariate analyses.

Results: Field interviewers averaged 11.5 hours of recruitment per enrolled participant. Thus far, our experiences indicate that Thursday through Saturday nights yield many more interactions relative to other days and times and more successful conversations occurred when initiated during the weekend and continued into the work week. Relative to those recruited from in-person approaches, those recruited from gay dating apps were not significantly different except they were more likely to be White (p=0.01) and to have ever heard about PrEP (p=0.001).

Conclusion: Our experiences indicate that gay dating apps are a convenient and viable method for recruiting YMSM and transgender women into an HIV prevention study. Further, they are similar in reported HIV risk and prevention continuum engagement compared to those recruited from other approaches. ATN CARES recruitment will continue until May 2019 and expand efforts to include non-gay (e.g., Plenty of Fish) and non-dating (e.g., Instagram) app specific social media outlets. This presentation will leverage the larger sample to perform multivariable analysis to compare HIV risk and prevention indicators by recruitment method and across social media apps.