HIV Treatments Optimism Among Gay Men: An International Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine HIV optimism (i.e., optimism in the light of highly active antiretroviral therapy [HAART]) among gay men in four industrialized countries using a standard scale. METHODS: Gay men were surveyed between January and December 2000 in Australia (Sydney and Melbourne, n = 3,120), Canada (Vancouver, n = 357), England (London, n = 690), and France (Paris, n = 1,715). Information was collected on HIV status, sexual behavior, and responses to a four-item HIV optimism scale. Possible responses to each item were as follows: strongly disagree, 1; disagree, 2; agree, 3; and strongly agree, 4. Agreement indicated optimism in the light of new HIV drug therapies. Total scores could range from a minimum of 4 (strongly disagree on all four items [i.e., not at all optimistic]) to a maximum of 16 (strongly agree on all four items [i.e., extremely optimistic]). RESULTS: In all cities, mean scores on the four-item scale were low (<7), indicating that for the most part men disagreed with the optimism statements. Mean scores were lowest in Paris (p <.001). There was no consistent relationship between mean optimism score and HIV status. In multivariate analysis, the association between mean optimism score and both city (p <.001) and HIV status (p =.05) was significant as was the interaction between city and HIV status (p =.02); the association between mean optimism score and age was not significant (p =.6). In London, Paris, and Sydney/Melbourne but not Vancouver, the mean optimism scores for men reporting high-risk sexual behavior were higher than scores for other men (p <.001). CONCLUSION: In the year 2000, only a few gay men in Australian, Canadian, and European cities were optimistic in the light of new HIV drug therapies. Although there was an association between HIV optimism and high-risk sexual behavior, causality could not be established. The lack of a consistent association between HIV optimism and HIV status across the cities suggests heterogeneity in gay men's response to HAART in different countries.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".