Throughout 2015 the Engage team worked with our community, public health, and research partners to create the first draft of the questionnaire. We began this iterative process by identifying priorities for the questionnaire that reflected the experiences of gay and bisexual men regarding HIV and STI prevention. The second phase was to identify question sets previously found to be valid and reliable, and if none were available for a given topic, to identify the best wording possible for novel questions. In line with a socio-ecological sexual health framework, the questionnaire asks about individual attitudes, drug use and sexual behaviours, relationships, community supports, social context, and use of health services related to HIV and STI prevention among gay and bisexual men. Given the size of this questionnaire, we divided it into sections that a number of subcommittees reviewed over teleconferences held in early and mid-2015.
With overall coordination by Len, our National Team Coordinator, and Emilie and Ashleigh, our Site Coordinators in Montreal (Engage Montreal) and Momentum (the Vancouver arm of Engage), we collated the documents into a comprehensive questionnaire that was reviewed over several in-depth discussions among the Principal Investigators and coordinators in late 2015. In Winter 2015-2016, we brought the questionnaire to our Community Engagement Committees and co-Investigators, who commented extensively about the content and structure of the questionnaire. We also brought the questionnaire to our community partners at local AIDS service and gay men’s health organizations so each site questionnaire reflects the HIV/STI prevention and sexual health promotion programs and services in each province. We are in the last stages of our deliberative and community-engaged process. All three sites submitted the study for Research Ethics Board (REB) approval in the last week of March. As a computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), programming will be needed to further digitize the survey; this will be done by the BC Centre for Excellence based on their experience with Momentum.
Engage
July 27th, 2016