Short Trainings on Methods for Recruiting, Sampling, and Counting Hard-to-Reach Populations: The H2R Training Program

项目总结 行为和社会科学研究人员继续努力接触、采样、计数、参与和留住 参与者来自社会弱势群体和边缘化群体，或难以接触到的人群。难以触及的地方 人口通常是那些在许多疾病和条件下经历健康差距的人。这样的人群 包括：无家可归和住房不安全的人、慢性精神病、失学青年、 性工作者、被贩卖的少女、非法移民、帮派成员、街头儿童、 使用毒品、种族/少数民族、性少数群体和性别少数群体，如变性人和 和男人做爱。有许多原因导致这些群体没有被完全代表或包括在行为， 社会科学和临床研究。一个原因是缺乏关于最先进方法的培训，以 样本难以接触到的人群和高级统计技能，以分析正式调查数据 培训计划。此外，课程中没有教授估算其数量所需的高级方法。 传统的行为学、公共卫生和社会科学学位课程。这些基本技能是 需要推进多项研究，以结束健康差距，更好地包容不同的人群 在研究中，并有效地获取足够数量的难以接触到的人群的样本 用于统计功能强大的研究设计。许多难以接触到的参与、招聘和抽样的创新 人口起源于艾滋病毒研究，但在行为和社会科学的其他领域仍未得到充分利用 研究。这笔H2 R培训赠款将利用我们对难以接触到的人群进行了15年的研究， 以及最近一项成功的倡议，即加州大学旧金山分校的抽样知识中心，以建立一个核心 短期课程，加强指导，并在受训人员难以接触到的人群中开展研究 大学的研究生和初级研究人员以及公共卫生从业者中的导师 北加州的卫生部门。

PROJECT SUMMARY Behavioral and social sciences researchers continue to struggle to reach, sample, count, engage and retain participants from socially disadvantaged and marginalized groups, or hard-to-reach populations. Hard-to-reach populations are often those experiencing health disparities for many diseases and conditions. Such populations include: persons experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, chronic mental illness, out of school youth, sex workers, trafficked adolescent girls, undocumented immigrants, gang members, street children, people who use drugs, racial/ethnic minorities, and sexual and gender minorities such as transgender persons and men who have sex with men. There are many reasons why these groups are not fully represented or included in behavioral, social sciences, and clinical research. One reason is the lack of training on state-of-the-art methodologies to sample hard-to-reach populations and the advance statistical skills to analyze complex survey data within formal training programs. Moreover, the advanced methods needed to estimate their numbers are not taught in conventional behavioral, public health, and social sciences degree programs. These fundamental skills are needed to advance multiple lines of research to end health disparities, to be more inclusive of diverse populations in research, and to efficiently obtain samples of hard-to-reach populations in large enough numbers necessary for statistically powerful study designs. Many innovations for engaging, recruiting, and sampling hard-to-reach populations originate from HIV research but remain underutilized in other areas of behavioral and social sciences research. This H2R training grant will capitalize on our >15 years of research with hard-to-reach populations at risk for HIV, and a recent successful initiative, the Sampling Knowledge Hub at UCSF, to establish a core of short courses, strengthen mentorship, and initiate lines of research among hard-to-reach populations for trainees and mentors among graduate students and junior researchers at universities and public health practitioners of health departments in Northern California.