In their attempts to understand and prevent HIV transmission, public health professionals and researchers sometimes ask individuals to recall their sexual and drug injection partners. In the context of partner notification, public health professionals interview patients who have tested positive for HIV in order to identify persons who may have been exposed to HIV, notify these partners of their possible exposure and urge them to seek HIV testing and counseling. In social network research on HIV transmission researchers interview individuals at high risk for HIV infection about the structure and composition of their personal and social risk networks in order to predict how the epidemic might spread and to understand the social influences on HIV risk behavior. Memory research indicates that recall of a specific set of information from long-term memory in a single interview is usually substantially incomplete. This suggests that the recall of sexual and drug injection partners in partner notification and social network research interviews may also be incomplete, which may hamper efforts to understand and prevent HIV transmission. The first phase of the proposed project consists of a study to estimate the magnitude of the incompleteness of recall of sexual and drug injection partners, identify the factors involved with not naming partners and describe patterns in the recall of partners. In the second project phase, the results from this study will be used to develop and pilot test different recall strategies and cues for enhancing recall of partners. Promising recall strategies and cues will be included in a systematic interview procedure for enhancing recall of sexual and drug injection partners. In the final phase of the project, the effectiveness of this new procedure will be evaluated in partner notification and social network research contexts. Subjects for all three phases will be recruited from a large study of drug injectors in Seattle and the largest clinic for HIV testing and counseling in the Seattle metropolitan area.
| Brewer, Devon D; Potterat, John J; Muth, Stephen Q et al. (2005) Randomized trial of supplementary interviewing techniques to enhance recall of sexual partners in contact interviews. Sex Transm Dis 32:189-93 |
| Potterat, John J; Brewer, Devon D; Muth, Stephen Q et al. (2004) Mortality in a long-term open cohort of prostitute women. Am J Epidemiol 159:778-85 |
| Brewer, D D; Garrett, S B (2001) Evaluation of interviewing techniques to enhance recall of sexual and drug injection partners. Sex Transm Dis 28:666-77 |
| Brewer, D D; Potterat, J J; Garrett, S B et al. (2000) Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 97:12385-8 |
| Brewer, D D; Garrett, S B; Kulasingam, S (1999) Forgetting as a cause of incomplete reporting of sexual and drug injection partners. Sex Transm Dis 26:166-76 |
