Biography: Dr. Susan Cassels is a Professor in the Department of Geography at UCSB, and the Director of the Broom Center for Demography. She studies and teaches topics related to health geography, demography, and infectious disease epidemiology. The central focus of her research is on geographic mobility, sexual health, and HIV prevention. Her current research is on geo-social determinants of HIV transmission dynamics – or in other words how and why certain people are more susceptible to HIV, and how, where, and why HIV spreads to other people. With colleagues at UCLA, she has implemented a survey on activity spaces of sexual minority men in LA to examine patterns of geo-spatial exposures, and whether places of exposure differ by activity. Recently, she has published a couple of qualitative papers as well. Current qualitative work is aimed to understand how social networks and geographic environments shape substance use behaviors.

Patterns of Sexual Minority Men’s Lifestyle and Healthcare Related Activity Spaces in Los Angeles

Abstract: For sexual minority men (SMM), geo-social exposures in residential and non-residential places are important to consider for health, as home, social, sexual, substance use, and healthcare-related locations may be different. Using data from 219 Black and Hispanic SMM within Los Angeles County, we identify, describe, and assess overlap of both lifestyle and healthcare-related activity space clusters, or “hotspots.” Lifestyle activity space hotspots are spatially patterned by socio-demographic characteristics, primarily along race and ethnic categories. Hispanic individuals’ lifestyle locations were less likely to be clustered, while the opposite was true for Black individuals. Interestingly, healthcare-related hotspots are not significantly associated with any socio-demographic features. Hotspot congruence was higher than we hypothesized, as hotspots of residential locations contained the majority of sex hotspots and substance use hotspots. Our work demonstrates a valid method for reliably measuring behaviors of HIV, sex, and substance use and identifying spatial patterns in geographic space.

An audio recording of Dr. Cassels’ presentation may be accessed here.

The slides of the presentation may be accessed here.