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Media coverage has highlighted raids, mass arrests, and undercover stings of illicit massage parlors in United States cities and suburbs. This study defines "illicit," as a sub-set of massage parlors that purport to operate as legal businesses but where sexual services are illegally bought and sold. Although some media accounts have highlighted linkages between illicit massage parlors, human trafficking, and the fact that many of the workers are Asian immigrant women, the daily experiences of workers in illicit massage parlors are rarely reported from their own perspectives. To fill this gap in knowledge, researchers interviewed 116 Chinese and Korean women who reported that they had provided sexual services in a massage parlor setting in New York City or Los Angeles County. This data collection includes anonymized responses from these women about their demographic background, path to working in massage parlors, working conditions, social networks, sexual health and access to healthcare, victimization by clients and managers, and trust in law enforcement.

This project surveys 3,800 Mexican migrants and immigrants (MMIs) who travel through the San Diego - Tijuana border region. The study recruits MMIs from four subpopulations: returning voluntarily from the United States to Mexico; returned from the United States to Mexico by the United States Border Patrol; arriving at Tijuana from other Mexican border regions; and traveling North from other Mexican regions. These MMIs are surveyed on HIV-related practices and migration, and are tested for HIV infection. Additionally, a pilot survey (N=300) on health care access and utilization is conducted to test the feasibility of applying the proposed survey methods to the study of this and other migrant health areas. Additional information can be found at the project web site. In particular there are now two additional surveys that have been conducted as part of this study: a full scale health care access survey (n=2,285) and recently completed survey on HIV risk among deported Mexican migrants (n=2,064).

The Malawi Journals Project provides a unique perspective on a contemporary epidemic in Africa. Begun in 1999, when HIV incidence and prevalence peaked, it tracked contradictions between survey data and qualitative data. After the first round of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) (ICPSR 20840), in 1998, the researchers had a great deal of data about the composition and structure of local social networks in which rural Malawians talked about AIDS. They had not; however, learned much about the content of the social interactions--what people said to each other, rather than to interviewers, about AIDS or their strategies for avoiding infection and death--and even less about the wider everyday interactions that shaped responses to the epidemic.

In 1999 Susan Watkins instituted "The Malawi Journals Project" as a complement to a longitudinal survey that she was conducting in rural Malawi. At that time, Malawians were suffering and dying from a major AIDS epidemic. After the first round of the survey, she found evidence of social desirability bias. For example, when survey interviewers asked men under age 35 how many sexual partners they had, the typical response was that they had only one sexual partner, their wife. In the context of Malawi, as well as other African countries; however, a man with only one partner was so unusual that his survey response was not believable.

Watkins thus developed a new approach to data collection: learning what men and women said to each other rather than to an interviewer. After the first round of the survey the researchers had a great deal of data about the composition and structure of the social networks in which rural Malawians talked about AIDS. They had not; however, learned much about the content of the social interactions--what people said to each other, rather than to interviewers, about AIDS or their strategies for avoiding infection and death--and even less about the wider everyday interactions that shaped responses to the epidemic. Thus, the researchers improvised by commissioning 10 high school graduates, both men and women, who had worked for the survey to be participant observers as they went about their daily routines. They were to pay attention to what their peers said about the AIDS epidemic in their informal social networks, such as walking to a funeral or drinking at a bar, and to write the conversation word for word in a private space. If they overheard anything concerning AIDS, they were to make mental notes of what people said and did, and then write their recollections word-for-word in commonplace school notebooks that evening or soon thereafter. The notebooks were given to a local intermediary who mailed them to the researchers. In 2005, Watkins invited a colleague, Adam Ashforth, an ethnographer who had conducted research in Malawi, to join the Malawi Journals Project

More than 1,000 journals have been written since 1999, each approximately 12 single-spaced typed pages, and each usually covering several different conversations or incidents. Since there are frequently several people conversing, the reader can overhear, at second hand, several thousand people. Twenty-two journalists (9 females, 13 males) have contributed to the corpus of texts, with three (two males, one female) contributing very frequently, 13 frequently, and six only occasionally. The diarists wrote in English, a language learned in school, and used parentheses or carets to set off their explanatory comments or untranslatable expressions in the local language. The handwriting and repetitions suggest they often wrote rapidly. We have retained locutions that reflect local adaptations of English. English is taught in Malawian public schools starting in Standard 5, equivalent to U.S. fifth grade, and has become somewhat indigenized. For example, to be sexually promiscuous is to be "movious" and one who has multiple partners is said to be "moving around," an Anglicization of a Chichewa expression, woyendayenda, derived from the earlier association of multiple partners with migrant labor. The naturalness with which the journalists adapt English to Chichewa, chiYao, or chiTumbuka linguistic forms means that their English is somewhat closer to local languages than is the standard English in which a Canadian, British or American ethnographer might translate local languages. In our publications, we have retained most of the idiosyncrasies in grammar and spelling, although on occasion we insert obviously missing words in brackets and make minor corrections.

Initially, Malawians were convinced that all would die of AIDS, and were skeptical about the attempts of the government and international organizations to reduce new HIV infections. Over the subsequent years, this began to change as conversational partners advised each other to be careful to select their sexual partners with care. By 2017, men and women speaking about AIDS in their social networks acknowledged that times had changed, and the number of new HIV infections had steeply declined.

The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) is one of very few long-standing longitudinal cohort studies in a poor Sub-Saharan African (SSA) context. It provides a record of more than 25 years of demographic, socioeconomic, and health conditions in one of the world's poorest countries. Initial data collection began in 1998 under the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) to examine social networks and fertility decisions among married women and their husbands. While this initial study population is still followed, the scope of the project and population expanded to a broader focus on social and contextual determinants of health across the lifecourse in Malawi.

This collection includes Rounds 1 through 9 of the MLSFH, as well as supplemental data collections from Sexual Diaries, Migration Follow-Ups (MHM), a Biomarker Survey, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), and a Benefits of Knowledge Intervention Survey. The MLSFH Data web page contains additional information and cohort profiles for all MLSFH data collections, including those not made available through ICPSR-DSDR.

The Migrante Project is a binational study that examines health status and access to health care among Mexican migrants. Since 2007, Migrante investigators have implemented a series of cross-sectional probability-based surveys on Mexico's northern border. The current phase of Migrante includes three survey waves (N=1,200 each), each focused on a specific topic area. Data for the Wave I survey focused on HIV and sexual/reproductive health. Wave II is focused on non-communicable disease. Data collection for this wave is ongoing. Wave III (data to be collected in 2023) will focus on mental health and substance use. All surveys contain additional questions on socio-demographics, health status, health care access, migration history, and contextual factors related to migration stage. All waves also include biometric testing (for example, rapid HIV testing). Participants are sampled from four different migrant flows:

• Northbound flow: Migrants traveling north and arriving at the border from other regions in Mexico
• Southbound flow - Border: Migrants traveling from the Mexico side of the Mexico-US border to points farther south
• Southbound flow - U.S.: Migrants returning to Mexico from the U.S. voluntarily
• Deported flow: Migrants returning to Mexico from the U.S via deportation

The data herein come from the Wave I survey and were collected in Tijuana, Matamoros, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico between August 2020 and September 2021. The study employed a multistage sampling design, with a combination of geographic and temporal sampling units, modeled after the Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte de México (EMIF Norte). Migrante sampling sites for Wave I included bus stations, airports, and deportation stations in each of the three cities.

Eligible individuals were at least 18 years old, born in Mexico or other Latin American countries, fluent in Spanish, not residents of the city where the survey is being conducted (except for deported migrants), and traveling for labor reasons or change of residence. In total, there were 1,398 observations (northbound flow N=347, southbound flow N=703, and deported flow N=348) in Wave I, with 1,257 individuals completing the Wave I survey. Three hundred and six of these individuals belonged to the deported flow, 306 to the northbound flow, 336 to the southbound border flow, and 309 to the southbound U.S. flow. Consent rates ranged from 13% to 98% depending on the flow and survey city. Migrante surveys can be used to produce population-level estimates of health outcomes and health care access, investigate variations across migration phases, and explore the impact of health care and immigration policies on migrants' health outcomes, healthcare access, and individual and environmental health determinants.