Project Positive Attitudes Toward Health

The Project Positive Attitudes Toward Health (PATH) was a survey of people who inject drugs (PWIDs) aged 18 years old or older in Southeast Michigan. PATH was first conducted 2017 (Lee & Roddy, 2021) and then again in 2022-2023. Project PATH used respondent driven sampling (RDS) to recruit members of PWID who otherwise are hard to sample via traditional recruitment methods. Project PATH 2017 was an application of RDS to examine error properties empirically, whereas Project PATH 2022-2023 specifically aimed to examine the applicability of adaptive design for the goal of improving reproducibility of RDS implementation. From here on, Project PATH refers to the 2022-2023 study.The Project PATH started in May 2022 and continued until December 2023 with a total sample size of 915 for the baseline survey. The Project PATH interviews were conducted in four counties in Southeast Michigan: Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and St. Clair counties. Questions in the baseline survey covered topics such as general health, mental health, illicit drug use, health risk behaviors, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, sexual orientation, health care service utilization and as well as socio-demographics. Questions specific to the interest of the local stakeholders were developed; these included topics related to Hepatitis A and access to naloxone. Demographic variables include gender, race, marital status, education level, age, and employment status. A baseline follow-up survey that was conducted 2-3 weeks after the baseline main survey, with 281 participants. This focused on the topics related to the RDS peer recruitment experiences. The wave 2 survey was conducted starting in April, 2023. A total of 277 participants from the baseline participated in the wave 2 survey. The wave 2 survey focused on the topics of overdose experiences, emerging substance use disorder issues, social support, and discrimination