A Comparison of On-Line and Off-Line Sexual Risk in Men Who Have Sex With Men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To assess whether men who have sex with men (MSM) are more likely to report unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) with partners met on-line compared with those met off-line. METHODS: A total of 6122 individuals consented to participate in an anonymous behavioral survey on-line. This event-based analysis is limited to the 1683 men from the United States and Canada who had sex in the 3 months before the study and reported that their last sexual encounter included a new or casual male partner or partners. Prevalence and predictors of UAI were analyzed separately for the 386 men reporting more than 1 partner (multiple) and the 1297 men reporting only 1 (single) partner in their last encounter. RESULTS: Of the 1683 MSM recruited on-line, 51% met their partner(s) in their last sexual encounter on-line and 23% reported UAI. No difference in risk for UAI was found for partners met on-line versus off-line in the bivariate or multivariate analyses. In a multivariate analysis of men with multiple-partner encounters, UAI was significantly associated with being HIV-seropositive (adjusted odds ratio [OR] = 2.87; P = 0.02) in a model that included age; education; whether partners were met on-line or off-line; and use of crystal methamphetamine, sildenafil, or alcohol before sex. Using the same model, significant predictors of UAI in men reporting a single-partner encounter were use of crystal methamphetamine (adjusted OR = 5.67; P = 0.001) and no college degree (adjusted OR = 1.63; P = 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: MSM recruited on-line who reported a new or casual sex partner(s) in the prior 3 months are at considerable risk of HIV or other sexually transmitted infections, but they are equally likely to report UAI whether sex partners were met on-line or off-line. The Internet may be an ideal venue for reaching high-risk MSM.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".