In 2007, a large scale behavioral surveillance survey (N = 1764) was conducted in 10 Ukrainian cities using chain referral sampling to measure HIV risk behaviors and service utilization among men who have sex with men (MSM). The majority of MSM were 25 years or older, completed secondary school or higher, never married, and currently single. Just over a third of MSM reported not using a condom at last penetrative sex with a man. In a multivariate regression analysis controlling for several factors MSM had significantly higher odds of using a condom at last penetrative sex with another man if they were younger, had occasional partners in the past 6 months, ever had an HIV test and perceived themselves to be at high risk for HIV and significantly lower odds if they had sexual contact with a main male or with any female partner in the past 6 months and used alcohol in the past month. This article provides baseline data about MSM's sexual risk behaviors in Ukraine and discusses the need for essential targeted prevention and intervention programs to help MSM make informed decisions about their sexual behaviors. KEYWORDS.Ukraine, HIV/AIDS, sexual risk behaviors, condom use, men who have sex with men Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe bordering the Black Sea, between Poland, Romania, and Moldova in the west and Russia in the east. As a former soviet republic, Ukraine has experienced major political, economic, and social changes associated with declines in health and life expectancy and growth in informal economies, including drugs and the sex trade since the collapse of the Soviet Union in
Transgender people, being stigmatized, discriminated against, abused, and having less access to social, health, and public health services appear to be a hard-to-reach group for researchers. Thus, with very few opportunities for research, especially representative ones, it is challenging to plan high-quality and effective interventions that would help overcome stigma and discrimination as well as prevent violence against this group. The methods used to recruit respondents from hard-to-reach groups to assume that less visible subgroups can be accessed through the available, more visible ones. Still, the data presented in this article indicate the incoherence of social networks of trans- and non-binary people due to the stigma and discrimination. The main empirical findings aimed to describe the instability of the social ties within a group of transgender and non-binary people, probable explanations for the causes of this instability, and the main lines of the community fragmentation. Personal traumatic experiences of transgender people and the dispersion of the community also affect its weak involvement in civic activities. The paper dwells upon a phenomenon that is argotically called “stealth”: a transgender person in a particular time, having achieved the desired result in transgender transition, distances themself from the community, striving to live an everyday life in society in a new gender. Accordingly, such people lose all or most of their social ties with other transgender and/or non-binary people and are inaccessible both to the research aimed at this specific group and to various social programs. Based on the material used in this article, we can discuss the lack of a single community of transgender and non-binary people in Ukraine and the need to use this term about transgender and non-binary people in the plural, not singular, because each subgroup of trans- and non-binary people, is a separate community. At the same time, the existing forms of stable connections are described, such as public organizations, networks of fictitious kinship, etc. This article will be helpful for researchers, as well as project managers whose attention is focused on transgender and non-binary people in Ukraine.
The proposed article describes the global experience of adapting the RDS (respondent-driven sample) methodology, used as a de facto standard in large-scale quantitative studies of social groups, to the world of web communications. The experience accumulated in global practice allows us to state that WebRDS is faster and cheaper, provides a greater diversity of the research population and the possibility of recruiting simultaneously at several sites without extensive contacts in local communities, works in countries with very different income levels of the population, and can be combined with traditional RDS, and other survey methods (e.g., with telephone survey). At the same time, WebRDS has its own characteristics, among which we note the vulnerability to fraud, the sensitivity of the response rate to the size of the questionnaire, the presence of biases caused by access to the Internet or mobile connection and the habit of using online tools, not always full control of the research team over the use of the collected data with the help of third-party Internet data platforms, as well as higher requirements for the technical competence of both researchers and ethics committees, etc. In Ukraine, the prerequisites for successfully implementing WebRDS have been created. Considering the challenges that have arisen due to the occupation of part of the territories and the large-scale migration of the population, it seems appropriate to adapt the available foreign experience in implementing such a recruiting system to the practice of biobehavioral research of vulnerable groups in Ukraine.
The article presents the results of a content-analytical study of 243 publications in online media of Ukraine during 2021 in comparison with the results of earlier monitorings of Ukrainian offline and online media. Analysis of both scientific literature shows that hate speech against minorities (in particular, LGBT) is an urgent issue that has a distinct practical dimension, because the spread of hate in the online environment can have the nature of an epidemic and be accompanied by an increase in violent acts. Although the results have a number of limitations (different ways of forming selective sets of media materials in the analyzed studies, lack of research consensus on the definition of hate speech, attribution of the collected data to the period before the beginning of the massive invasion of the Russian Federation troops on the territory of Ukraine and impossibility of reflecting the state of society in the war time), it showed that the number of news related to LGBT was decreasing, despite of media samples design. Publications containing hate speech were from 2 to 25%. Hate speech in these publications was usually quotes and does not express the position of the journalist. Hate speech arose in the context of both public and internal actions of the LGBT community and was accompanied by calls for violence or violence itself. Stronger hate speech was more typical for anonymous internet commentators, street hooligans (including those from organized right-wing gangs), and small local public figures. The collected materials are analyzed in the paradigm of R. Connell’s hierarchy of masculinities. Hate speech is characteristic primarily for the statements of athletes, military and politicians, that is, those who are associated in the public consciousness with the stereotypical image of a “real man”. In further studies, approaches to the formation of media samples should be standardized, as well as, the tools for automatic or semi-automatic content analysis should be developed. All this will facilitate the study of changes in hate speech in the public space.
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