Measures
HIV INFECTION
The primary outcome was time to HIV seroconversion. HIV seroconversion at any time point between baseline and 12 months was considered an incident HIV infection, and date of seroconversion was estimated as the midpoint between the participant’s last HIV negative result and their HIV positive result.Interviewers were instructed to code the gender of participants as male (coded “0”) or female (coded “1”) at baseline. Admittedly, this was not a true assessment of gender, as it was based on the perception and judgment of the interviewer and conflated, perhaps inadvertently, sex with gender. However, for the purposes of this analysis, we call this variable We examined gender as a potential moderator of the effect of the intervention on HIV seroconversion, which we operationalized and tested in two ways. First, network gender composition (i.e., number of women), including the index (range = 0–3), was assessed to determine if the effect of the intervention differed by the number of women comprising the network. This scenario would permit both female indexes and female network members to be included in the moderation effect. Second, moderation by index gender was assessed to determine if the effect of the intervention differed by whether or not the index was female, regardless of network gender composition. We examined number (rather than proportion) of women due to low variability in network size. Control variables were consistent with those in the original study and included age (continuous), city (Odesa vs Donetsk; Mykolaiv vs Donetsk), and injection frequency at baseline (continuous), though we log-transformed injection frequency to stabilize variance.