A Protocol for Recruiting Sexual and Gender Minority Youth through Gay Dating Apps (Preprint)

Abstract

HIV continues to disproportionately impact sexual and gender minority youth (SGMY) in the US. Public health efforts have increasingly focused on developing efficacious interventions to curb the further spread of HIV among SGMY and to help those living with HIV achieve and sustain viral suppression. However, recruiting and engaging SGMY in prevention and care interventions has been challenging.

Over the past decade, gay dating apps have quickly emerged as popular online spaces in which SGMY congregate. Although recruitment of SGMY through these apps has been commonly reported, advertisement is the typical modality used and direct recruitment approaches are not adequately described. In this paper, we describe our process for developing a direct recruitment protocol for use in gay dating apps.

ATN CARES is a community-based research program consisting of 3 interrelated studies testing scalable behavioral interventions to improve HIV prevention and care engagement among youth ages 12-24 in Los Angeles and New Orleans. To supplement our in-person recruitment approaches for CARES, the New Orleans site formed a gay dating app recruitment team. In April, 2018, the team developed a loosely structured protocol that included study specific profiles and sample language, to guide the initial recruitment efforts. Two self-identified Black, gay cis-male field recruiters field tested the protocol on the popular gay dating app, Jack’d. During the field test, the recruitment team met weekly to discuss recruiters’ experiences and user reactions. For example, we learned the importance of addressing concerns over study legitimacy and identifying appropriate ways to describe the study. We iteratively incorporated these lessons learned into the final protocol and developed a training program and tracking procedures before moving to full-scale implementation at both sites.

Adhering to this protocol yielded 162 enrollments in New Orleans (332 total enrollments across the two sites) throughout the recruitment period (April, 2018 – August, 2019). A majority of these participants were sexual minority cisgender males (91%) and the remainder identified as gender minorities. We outline step-by-step instructions on how to train staff, engage users, and to schedule and track recruitment activities.

This paper provides a practical guide for researchers and community-based providers to implement a gay dating app recruitment protocol. Our experience indicates that gay dating app recruitment is feasible and fruitful when your staff is knowledgeable, flexible, honest and respectful of the user. Perhaps the most salient lesson we learned in approaching gay dating app users is the importance of setting clear and transparent intentions without judgment. As gay dating apps continue to increase in popularity, researchers need to stay vigilant to changing formats and develop systematic approaches to harness their potential as invaluable recruitment strategies for SGMY.

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03134833; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03134833 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/76el0Viw9)