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Presentation
Estimating the impact of community-level interventions: The SEARCH Trial and HIV Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa
WNAR/IMS and Graybill Conference (2012)
  • Laura Balzer, University of California, Berkeley
  • Maya Petersen, University of California, Berkeley
  • Joshua Schwab, University of California, Berkeley
  • Mark van der Laan, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract

Evaluation of community level interventions to prevent HIV infection presents significant methodological challenges. Even when it is feasible to randomly assign a treatment versus control level of the intervention to each community in a sample, measurement of incident HIV infection remains difficult. In this talk we describe an experimental design developed for the SEARCH Trial, a large community randomized trial that will evaluate the impact of expanded treatment on incident HIV and other outcomes. Regular community-wide testing campaigns are conducted and a random sample of community members who fail to attend a campaign are tracked. The data generated by this experiment are subject to non-monotone missingness; however, the missing at random assumption is known to hold by design, and the missingness mechanism is known. We present two-stage targeted minimum loss-based estimator (TMLE) of the randomized intervention on incident HIV infection using these data. The method described can also be applied, under additional non-testable assumptions, to estimate the effects of non-randomized community level interventions in the setting of incomplete tracking success.

Publication Date
June, 2012
Citation Information
Laura Balzer, Maya Petersen, Joshua Schwab and Mark van der Laan. "Estimating the impact of community-level interventions: The SEARCH Trial and HIV Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa" WNAR/IMS and Graybill Conference (2012)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/laura_balzer/3/