Impact of “absolute” versus “relative” HIV risk communication on pre-exposure prophylaxis interest in Canada: a randomized survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The way human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) acquisition risk is communicated can shape individuals’ perceptions and their interest in using pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This study examined two risk communication strategies among non-PrEP-using gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBM) in Canada. In 2022, adult GBMs in Ontario and British Columbia completed an online survey and were randomly assigned to receive HIV risk messages tailored to their risk assessment scores. Messages were framed in either absolute terms (“Your risk is XX%”) or relative terms (“Your risk is XX times that of other GBM”). Participants compared this with their self-rated HIV risk and indicated whether it increased their interest in PrEP. Logistic regression models were applied to analyze the data. Among 461 participants, 64.2% perceived themselves as low risk and 51.0% met clinical indications for PrEP. Of 428 participants, 56.9% in the “absolute” group versus 43.1% in the “relative” group reported increased PrEP interest (difference=13.8%, p=0.071). In multivariable analyses, absolute risk message framing was associated with higher, though non-significant, PrEP interest in the model adjusted for clinical indication (AOR:1.74, 95%CI:0.86–3.59) and in the model adjusted for prior PrEP use (AOR:1.49, 95%CI:0.95–2.35). These findings suggest that individualized risk framing in absolute terms may encourage PrEP interest, but addressing PrEP stigma and structural barriers such as cost remains essential to expand PrEP use.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".