Recruiting Sexual Minority Populations Posted on March 19, 2007 Recruiting participants from the gay immigrant community is difficult, states Hirokazu Yoshikawa (bio).

Sexual minority populations can be hard to recruit. I think in a city like New York City it's not as hard possibly as it might be in some other areas that aren't kind of meccas for gay men, and certainly for youth, for LGBT youth, I think it's just probably a more difficult and fraught kind of process.

But the studies that I've done were still somewhat difficult because these were gay men of color, and the gay community, the urban gay adult community is primarily white and affluent as far as kind of impact on the mainstream culture. So, gay men of color typically experience very high levels of discrimination in these communities. So, for those reasons, I think we had to do a lot of kind of searching around to figure out what are the social settings that, for example, Asian gay men are most likely to be in, and that's really working, doing a lot of work up front with community based organizations, with social organizations that have links with men in these communities to get their advice and to do actually a lot of field work before, and thinking through the details of recruitment processes and those kinds of things.

And with a population like that, the obvious places to go because social contexts for GLBT populations are often social contexts that might be, say bars or clubs or those kinds of places. But that only attracts a certain segment of the population, so if you start thinking about the group that doesn't go to those kinds of settings, it gets more challenging. So, it's fairly easy to go to a bar, as long as you don't go too late at night when they're too inebriated to fill out anything, but to recruit participants in that kind of setting. To actually then go and tap social networks that might overlapped with immigrant communities in the cases of Asian and Latino men. Those are more challenging.

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