There were nine questions about difficult sexual situations, and four about difficult relationships. These tended to be situations where there was a conflict between what people wanted to do, and what they felt pressure to do. They also asked questions, which turned out to be important, about what they called “difficult sexual situations and relationships”. "Most people are uncomfortable around someone with HIV”."It is safe to have anal sex without a condom with an HIV-positive man who has an undetectable viral load?”.“If a man you are having sex with starts to do something unsafe, how difficult is it for you to stop him?”.“How much does pausing to put on a condom ruin the sexual mood?”.Typical questions in this section included, for instance: It asked them to what degree they agreed that they were capable of maintaining safer sex in their relationships, that condoms were easy or difficult to use, whether HIV treatment reduced people’s infectiousness, whether they agreed that stigma against people with HIV was still severe, and so on.
The other set looked at the men’s beliefs and relationships. A transmission cluster is a group of people who have similar strains of the virus, which suggests (but does not prove) HIV transmission between those individuals. By comparing the genetic sequence of the virus in different individuals, scientists can identify viruses that are closely related.