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This Blog will keep you up-to-date on what is happening with the SWEAT study. The University of California San Francisco (www.ucsf.edu) along with St. James Infirmary (www.stjamesinfirmary.org) conducts the SWEAT study, which stands for Sex Worker Environmental Assessment Team. What the study hopes to determine is whether diminished social capital leads to an increased prevalence of HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and viral hepatitis among female sex workers in San Francisco, CA.

In the first phase of the study, we used ethnographic methods to understand the cultural landscape of the sex worker communities in San Francisco. This involved participant-observation, 60 one-on-one semi-structured interviews with sex workers of all genders, 6 focus groups, and a community agency analysis to understand the social context in which sex work occurs.

The second phase will use respondent driven sampling (RDS) to interview and test approximately 450 female sex workers. The way RDS works is that we will pick 4-6 initial seeds (these are people who represent a range of sex work experience), they will come in for the interview and screening, and then we pay them to recruit up to three of their female sex worker friends.

After completion of the second phase, we will conduct a multi-level analysis that will consist of an individual-level analysis and a network-level analysis. We will then evaluate the network-level association between degree of social capital and aggregated prevalence of HIV, STIs, and hepatitis.