HALIRA Methods

At any given time, there were four young East African members of the HALIRA field research team. The team consisted of one male and one female Swahili-speaking graduate researcher, and one male and one female Swahili- and Sukuma-speaking high school graduate. These researchers worked alone or in same-sex or multi-lingual pairs, depending on the research needs.

• 158 person-weeks of participant observation were carried out in nine villages. Researchers lived in the homes of villagers, befriending and accompanying young people as they went about their daily activities, and taking detailed, daily records of their observations and conversations.
• 203 in-depth interviews were conducted with HIV-positive and randomly selected MkV1 trial participants from every trial community. 70 individuals participated in two of these interviews, at the beginning and the end of the MkV1 trial.
• 21 group discussions and 50 in-depth interviews were conducted in a week-long series with young adults in each of three villages.
• 8 group discussions were conducted with MkV1 class peer educators and other trial participants from two randomly selected schools in each of the four project districts.
• 18 simulated patient exercises were conducted, in which trained rural young people presented themselves as patients at randomly selected MkV1 trial health facilities, using scripted sexual health scenarios that were designed to assess youth-friendliness.
• An innovative assisted self-completion questionnaire (ASCQ) survey method was developed and tested, with the goal of combining the privacy of a self-completion questionnaire with the clarity of a face-to-face questionnaire for semi-literate populations. This method was used to survey approximately 6,000 MkV1 trial participants alongside the biological marker and face-to-face questionnaire surveys that were conducted at the beginning, middle and end of the MkV1 trial.