Leveraging resilience-supportive strategies to enhance protective factors in young sexual minority men: A scoping review of HIV behavioral interventions implemented in high-income countries

Behavioral HIV interventions focused on strengthening young sexual minority men’s (SMM) internal (assets) and external (resources) protective factors are promising, yet their evaluation as resilience-supportive strategies to minimize or negate HIV-related risks remain understudied. The objective of this scoping review was to describe resilience-supportive intervention strategies that have been used to achieve desired HIV behavioral outcomes and to identify how these strategies have been evaluated using a resilience analytic framework. Our scoping review uncovered 271 peer-reviewed articles, of which 38 were eligible for inclusion based on our review criteria. The majority of interventions relied on social support strategies as their primary resilience-supportive strategy. A third of interventions reviewed analyzed their findings from a deficits-focused model, another third used compensatory resilience models, and the remaining interventions employed a hybrid (i.e., deficit and compensatory model) strategy. None of the interventions evaluated their intervention effects using a risk-protective model. From our synthesis regarding the current state of research around resilience-informed interventions, we propose strategies to inform the design of resilience-supportive approaches and make recommendations to move the field forward on how to develop, implement, and measure young SMM’s resiliency processes.

• Epidemiology and Determinants of Health
  • Determinants of Health
• Determinants of Health
  • Social support
• Population(s)
  • Men who have sex with men
  • General HIV- population
• Prevention, Engagement and Care Cascade
  • Engagement and Care Cascade
  • Prevention
• Engagement and Care Cascade
  • Linkage/engagement in care
  • Retention in care
  • Treatment
• Prevention
  • Sexual risk behaviour
  • Drug use behaviours/harm reduction
  • Biomedical interventions
  • Education/media campaigns
• Testing
  • Testing