Background:
Risk behaviors of those with incident syphilis in Los Angeles County (LAC) is collected by verbal interview recorded on paper by Public Health Investigators (PHI). Use of Personal Data Assistants (PDA) could enhance data quality, particularly if clients self-administered responses.

Objective:
Describe the advantages and disadvantages of PHIs or individuals with syphilis collecting risk behavior data with PDAs.

Method:
91 men with incident syphilis in LAC were randomly assigned to 3 interview methodologies: client self administers PDA (n=31), PHI uses PDA (n=31), or PHI uses paper interview (n=29). Differences between reported risk behaviors were compared between groups.

Result:
Clients' mean age was 35.3 years, most reported only sex with men (93%), 61% had college or higher education, 50% were Latino, 35% White, and 9% African American and were not different by group. Clients reported higher risk to PHIs with PDA than self-administering PDAs for: ever injected drugs (36% vs. 10%); being homeless (22% vs. 0%); methamphetamine use during sex (91% vs. 57%); having receptive anal sex (79% vs. 68%); and more sex partners in the past 12 months (15 vs 13 partners). On self-administered PDAs they reported more sex partners in the last 3 months (17 vs 9 partners); gang association, public sex, heroin injection, and PCP use, but the sample size was too small to detect significant differences for all but number of partners.

Conclusion:
Risk behavior data were more complete when PHIs used PDAs compared to paper but because PHIs ask followup questions during interviews, clients reported more risk behaviors than when self-administering the public health interview. Therefore, PDAs enhance data collection by PHI, and can be self-administered in special cases.

Implications:
PDAs are an important tool to help public health departments collect more complete risk behavior data on incident syphilis cases improving prevention interventions.