This paper identifies an important paradigm shift in social research on HIV transmission, drug abuse, and risk reduction research. The article describes the key research trends and the institutional support for social network analysis in the HIV and drug risk field for the past decade. Key hypotheses and recommended areas for future research are identified.

This research reports on an analysis of personal network data collected from 70 HIV-positive HIV/AIDS patients (48 men, 22 women; 45 black, 25 white). Issues examined were the conditions surrounding the difficulty of knowing information about social network members, including knowledge of HIV status. The stigmatizing nature of AIDS resulted in selective knowledge regarding a person's HIV status (and other information) among their social network members. Informants ' networks appeared smaller than those for other groups we have investigated, and this may be due to informant self-limiting, or alter rejection of HIV informant. These results will be useful in determining the amount of HIV + in the general population, and these methods could be applied to other hard-to-count populations. 1.