The EMIS project
European MSM Internet survey on knowledge, attitudes and behaviour as to HIV and STIs
Current News:
We are happy to announce that our partners at Maastricht University have successfully finished Work Package 4, which is the assessment of existing national questionnaires, and the drafting of a proposal for a consensus questionnaire (in English).
The 1st General Meeting of EMIS took place in Brussels on December 2-3, 2009, with 63 participants from 31 countries. During this meeting, the questionnaire draft has been discussed in depth in 5 workshops. The Associated Partners of EMIS are currently reviewing the workshop results to integrate the important inputs and suggestions for wording, prioritisation, and additions, to come up with a new draft before the end of this year. By doing so, EMIS moves on to Work Package 5, as outlined in the respective area of this website.
We want to thank all Collaborating Partners for their constructive contributions, especially for the four excellent presentations.We further thank the EAHC for assisting us with organizing the meeting, ECDC for their fundamental work on questionnaire harmonization, and ILGA for their contribution to the aspect of HIV and human rights. Last but not least, we want to express our gratitude to the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis for providing us with a room for the second day of the meeting.
Partners of the EMIS project can view the presentations of the plenary session (Charlemagne building of the European Commission), as well as summaries of the workshop results, in the restricted area of this website.
Please direct all questions to EMIS@rki.de.
Map of participating countries.
Background:
In most European countries, infections with HIV are concentrated among vulnerable groups like men who have sex with men (MSM), migrants, or users of intravenous drugs. In many countries, during the 1980s and early 1990s, a growing attention towards same-sex-relations issues, including gay rights, has been driven by a growing need of dealing with ongoing infections with a potentially lethal virus in vulnerable groups. Ressources for preventive behaviour and health maintaince among gay and bisexual men - for example access to adequate knowledge and information, access to HIV testing, access to HIV treatment - is strongly dependent on their general living conditions, or the degree of stigmatization of homosexuality and HIV infection.
Information on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour among hidden groups such as MSM is difficult to gather, as random samples cannot be drawn. Therefore, most studies on sexual minorities or other hidden groups rely on convenience samples recruited in gay venues (mostly sex-related places like saunas, parties or bars), GUM clinics, or HIV clinics. In recent years, the Internet has proven to be a useful tool for recruiting a broader spectrum of MSM in terms of age, education, or geographic distribution; thus including men who are not part of explicitly gay scenes, or men who reside in non-metropolitan areas. However, most existing surveys concentrate on national populations. At a European level, these results are very difficult to compare: Differing ways of accessing MSM lead to differences in the sample composition and hence to incomparable samples; and different questions targeting the same indicator result in incomparable answers. The EMIS project is the first approach in Europe to use a unique questionnaire and the same research design for prevention research among MSM.
Objectives:
General objective is to give input for improving 2nd generation surveillance and prevention work among MSM in the participating European countries. To achieve this, EMIS will generate comparable data about HIV and STI behaviour, HIV and STI prevention needs, gay community characteristics, and other sexual health-related issues among MSM in Europe by means of a common Internet survey, advertised and promoted on popular MSM websites and conducted in various European languages. The intended European survey will inform the planning of prevention interventions for MSM by identifying prevention needs unmet across diverse groups of MSM (priority aims), and identifying subgroups of MSM who have many prevention needs poorly met (priority target groups).
Methods:
Scientists who already have experience with internet surveys in MSM and scientists who so far only have experience with print questionnaires and venue-based sampling will collaborate in this project to develop a common set of core questions, conduct a simultaneous multilingual internet survey promoted on popular MSM websites all over Europe, and will jointly analyse and interpret the survey results.
Results:
First results of the EMIS project can be expected by summer 2010. The final report and other publications will be available on this webpage after that.