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Validation of the HIV Risk Assessment of Sexual Partnerships (H-RASP): Comparison to a 2-Month Prospective Diary Study

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Abstract

The HIV Risk Assessment of Sexual Partnerships (H-RASP) was developed in order to create a retrospective measure of sexual risk-taking that can account for the differing contexts of sexual partnership(s) within a specified period of time. In order to validate the H-RASP relative to other methods of measuring sexual risk-taking, measurements from the H-RASP were compared to data from a prospective diary study of 95 young men who have sex with men over the same two-month period. We found that the H-RASP was not significantly different at measuring participants’ total number of sexual partners and total number of anal sex partners in comparison with the diaries. The two measures were significantly different in measurement of total number of condomless anal sex (CAS) partners and number of CAS acts within partnerships, such that participants on average estimated more CAS partners and acts in the H-RASP. The two measures shared 40.8% of variance on measurement of CAS partners and 44.6% of variance on CAS acts within partnerships. These results suggest that even though the H-RASP is not a perfect replication of prospective diary data, it captures a moderate proportion of the same variance, and, in the case of CAS acts within partnerships, a proportion of the variance that likely would not be measured by retrospective measures that do not ask about behaviors specific to partnerships.

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Funding

This study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R03DA035704; PI: Newcomb).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical Social Sciences, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, 625 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 2700, Chicago, IL, 60611, USA

    Gregory Swann, Michael E. Newcomb & Brian Mustanski

  2. Northwestern University Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing, Chicago, IL, USA

    Gregory Swann, Michael E. Newcomb & Brian Mustanski

Authors
  1. Gregory Swann
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  2. Michael E. Newcomb
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  3. Brian Mustanski
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Correspondence to Michael E. Newcomb.

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Conflict of interest

Gregory Swann declares that he has no conflict of interest. Michael E. Newcomb declares that he has no conflict of interest. Brian Mustanski declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Swann, G., Newcomb, M.E. & Mustanski, B. Validation of the HIV Risk Assessment of Sexual Partnerships (H-RASP): Comparison to a 2-Month Prospective Diary Study. Arch Sex Behav 47, 121–131 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-1033-2

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