HIV This Week

Bull SS, Vallejos D, Levine D, Ortiz C. Improving recruitment and retention for an online randomized controlled trial: experience from the Youthnet study. AIDS Care. 2008;20(8):887-93.

The objective of the study was to present recruitment and retention findings for an Internet based HIV prevention trial evaluated using a randomized controlled design among 15-25-year-olds accessing a website on the Internet. Bull and colleagues used a combination of automated electronic and personalized approaches to increase and diversify recruitment, verify participant eligibility and increase retention. They posted 3.5 million banner advertisements, 9354 individuals clicked on the advertisement, 8950 completed an eligibility screener and 3298 a baseline survey; they flagged 675 of these as suspicious and enrolled 2623 individuals. Of these, 2082 (79%) completed a follow-up at one-month and 1398 (53%) completed a two-month follow-up. This retention rate is the highest seen for an Internet-based HIV-prevention trial. Their procedures can be replicated in other trials. We stress the importance of using a combination of automated and personalized techniques to increase enrollment, verify eligibility, and promote retention.

Editors’ note: This report of on-line internet prevention trial conduct describes methodological challenges in recruiting and retaining diverse and uniquely-identified participants and ways of addressing these hurdles. The intervention itself Keep it Real, following a baseline risk assessment, exposed participants to multiple 20-30 second role model stories with models tailored to participant gender and race/ethnicity (intervention arm) or text-based generic HIV prevention information (control arm). Although the results are not presented here, this article on online research makes for interesting reading on research techniques in this increasingly virtual world of information.