Parent-focused Intervention to Reduce HIV Risk in Gay and Bisexual Adolescents

Summary

Gay and bisexual youth make up 80% of all new HIV infections among adolescents ages 14-19 in the United States, yet interventions to improve sexual health outcomes in these youth are extremely limited. Our team has developed an intervention -- Parents and Adolescents Talking about Healthy Sexuality (PATHS) -- to reduce HIV risk for gay and bisexual youth by working with their parents to improve the ways parents communicate with their sons about sexual health. The intervention is all completed by parents online and takes 45-60 minutes to complete. The goal of this study is to test whether PATHS helps improve sexual health among gay and bisexual male teens ages 14-19.

To do this 350 parent-adolescent dyads will be recruited online (50% of those dyads will be racial/ethnic minority). Parents will be randomized to receive either PATHS or a control (a film designed to general support parents of gay/bisexual youth). Parents and sons will then complete surveys every 3 months over a 1-year period. Families assigned to PATHS will be compared to families assigned to the film 6 months after the intervention. Then the families originally given the control film will receive PATHS, and all dyads will be followed for another 6 months. This allows us to test the effects of PATHS in the control arm (by comparing families' experiences in the 6 months before they received the PATHS to their experiences over the next 6 months). It also allows us to test whether families who originally received PATHS will continue to benefit 9 and 12-months after the intervention.

To assess sexual health, adolescents will complete self-report measures of their comfort using condoms, their access to condoms, their knowledge of the correct way to use a condom, their intentions to use condoms, their awareness of pre-exposure prophylaxis as an HIV prevention method, and their attitudes toward PrEP. If they are sexually active, they will also report about their history of condom use during sex. Adolescents will also complete a video-recorded "condom demonstration" in which they will demonstrate the appropriate technique for applying a condom, using a real condom and a oval-shaped shampoo bottle. Finally, adolescents will self-report whether they have received an HIV test in the previous year, consistent with recommendations for gay and bisexual men by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Conditions

• Hiv
• Sexual Health

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Parents and Adolescents Talking about Healthy Sexuality (PATHS)

PATHS is an intervention delivered to parents of AMSM that aims to increase parent communication about sexuality and HIV, as well as other parent behaviors supportive of sexual risk reduction. PATHS can all be accessed online, is self-paced, and typically takes parents 40-60 minutes to complete. The toolkit is comprised of 7 modules, covering a range of topics relevant to increasing parents' motivation, self-efficacy, and intention for communicating about sex. Material is presented in a variety of modalities (e.g., text, videos of experts, videos of other parents describing their experiences). Parents set personalized goals for themselves regarding activities and conversations they want to have with their sons, selecting from a menu of options provided by the intervention. One month later parents complete a "refresher" module that queries them about whether they have achieved their goals, and provides customized content to support the behaviors parents have yet to enact.

BEHAVIORAL

Lead with Love (LWL)

Lead with Love is a 35-minute "education entertainment" film created to provide support, information, and behavioral guidance to parents of lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) children. Drawing from stage-based models of behavior change, and social cognitive theory, it aims to help parents progress through the process of coming to accept their child's sexual orientation, recognizing the importance of their behaviors and reactions to their child's health, and accepting their child's sexual orientation, and engaging in behaviors that are more supportive and less rejecting. This is achieved by telling the true stories of four families and how they responded to the news that their child was LGB, and by having experts (psychologists, teachers, clergy) provide information and guidance. One month after watching LWL, parents return to the website to review "refresher" materials that summarize the most important lessons from the film.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Northwestern University

  collaborator OTHER

• Duke University

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Utah

  collaborator OTHER

• George Washington University

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Model

CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age

14 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2023-04-24

Primary Completion

2026-11-01

Completion

2026-11-01

Countries

• United States

Study Locations