Conversational themes and interaction patterns in peer support for adolescents and young people living with HIV: scoping review protocol

This scoping review aims to systematically map the conversational themes, topics, and interaction patterns documented in peer support programs for adolescents and young people living with HIV (AYPLHIV) aged 15–24 years. While peer support has demonstrated effectiveness in improving ART adherence, retention in care, and psychosocial well-being among AYPLHIV, the specific conversational content that drives these outcomes remains largely uncharacterized. Existing systematic reviews have focused on peer support outcomes, implementation barriers, and provider/recipient experiences, but very little work has examined what peers and young people actually talk about across diverse settings and populations. This gap has direct implications for the design of digital health tools, including chatbots, mHealth apps, and online peer communities, which currently lack evidence-based frameworks for conversational content, as well as for training curricula for human peer supporters that may not reflect topics arising naturalistically in practice. Through this work, we expect to produce three primary outputs: a descriptive map of source characteristics (geographic distribution, income classification, settings, modalities, and interaction formats); an inductively developed thematic taxonomy of conversational content, presented separately for intentional content from training curricula and experiential content from empirical studies; and an alignment analysis comparing intentional versus experiential content to identify areas of convergence, aspirational gaps (themes prescribed but rarely observed), and curriculum gaps (themes emerging naturalistically but absent from training). Secondary objectives include characterizing how health-related concerns are framed by AYPLHIV in peer interactions and documenting protocols for managing safety concerns and crisis situations. The findings are intended to inform evidence-based content frameworks for both human-delivered and digitally-mediated peer support interventions for AYPLHIV globally.