Female sex workers in HIV/AIDS prevention: A social network analysis perspective

Female Sex Workers (FSWs) are a high-risk group that not only are susceptible to, but also may contribute to the spread of, HIV/AIDS. How to effectively intervene the FSW population for HIV/AIDS prevention has been a public concern. In this paper, relied on a set of interview data of FSWs collected from a city in Yunnan Province, China, we first construct a social network based on if FSWs have been acquaint. We find that the network has the characteristics of “small world” with a small average shortest path and a big clustering coefficient. The network also shows a “small community” phenomenon with a low average density. In other words, individuals are close to each other in community, and their external connection is sparse. The degree of the FSW social network obeys an exponential distribution, indicating that few numbers of nodes have a large centrality (i.e. the important individuals). In addition, those nodes that is more passive in HIV/AIDS prevention have a higher level of clustering, but a lower similarity with their neighbors. Finally, we use individuals’ responses to the AIDS KAP questionnaire to predict one’s position (or status) in the social network, as the social network structure is invisible, observable individual responses to the questionnaire is easier to obtain. We then propose an efficient method to choose the nodes based on individuals’ responses to AIDS KAP questionnaire for intervention and network clogging. We found that, compared with a random node selection method, our method is more effective.