Participants and Study Recruitment Procedures
RECRUITMENT, DISEASE
Recruitment was conducted at the Guangzhou Lingnan Community Support Center (hereinafter, Lingnan), a local MSM-friendly HIV testing clinic supported by the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [Potential participants were recruited according to the unit of an egocentric social network, which included 1 core member (ego) and several network members (alters), with the tie of HIV e-report delivery. The e-reports were only accessible to MSM who had undergone HIV testing at Lingnan. Ego recruiters were defined as MSM who underwent offline HIV testing at Lingnan and met the inclusion criteria. After agreeing to participate in this study as recruiters and filling in the written consent form, they shared their e-reports via the WeChat (Tencent Holdings Ltd.) mini-program “ChaBei” (an app for online booking of HIV test appointments, online-to-offline referral, offline clinic testing registration, and HIV e-report delivery) to their WeChat MSM contacts. Egos were randomly assigned to the exchangeable HIV e-report or regular HIV e-report group through the WeChat mini-program “ChaBei.” Alters were the MSM contacts who received and read the shared reports; those who click the link will be candidate alters in our study. An online page that provides study details will be presented to the candidate alters after they read the content of ego’s report. Those interested in this study will be asked to complete the screening questionnaire and eligible individuals will fill in an online consent form and become alters.The specific details of e-reports distributed through “ChaBei” were described in our published protocol [