Suchergebnisse

In several New York City neighborhoods more than 1 in 10 adults and adolescents are infected with HIV. Children in these neighborhoods are exposed both directly and indirectly to the effects of the HIV epidemic. Exploratory group interviews were conducted to discover the HIV-related concerns of adolescent and pread-olescent girls and boys living in a high-sero-prevalence neighborhood and to specify the context within which children experienced those concerns. Results indicated that explanations about HIV focusing only on transmission and transmission prevention, whether in educational or family settings, may ignore compelling concerns of youth. Both risk of HIV and loss of neighbors and relatives to HIV permeate daily life but in a way that prevents open discussion. Children are eager to talk about social and personal issues regarding HIV.

This paper provides a speculative discussion on what quasi-experimental designs might be useful in various aspects of HIV/AIDS research. The first author's expertise is in research design, not HIV, while the second author has been active in HIV prevention research. It is hoped that it may help the HIV/AIDS research community in discovering and inventing an expanded range of possibilities for valid causal inference. DOI:10.2458/azu_jmmss_v3i1_campbell

War and disaster often strike impoverished and stressed communities. The Lower East Side of New York City (LES) became one of those communities on September 11, 2001, when youth and parents experienced the destruction of the nearby World Trade Center. HIV-affected and HIV-infected parents discussed their own and their families' reactions. LES parents felt they had dealt with the initial effects of the World Trade Center disaster well, but were concerned about their ability to deal with continued threat. This challenge was made more difficult as they saw the number and quality of safe places from which to view and interpret events diminish, and their opportunities to establish reserves that would help them cope erode. HIV posed additional difficulties post-disaster. Implications are drawn for emergency preparedness planning for urban families.

Throughout U.S. history, women have changed their sexual behaviors in response to, or as actors affecting, economic, political, and legal imperatives; to preserve health; to promote new relationship, identity or career paths; to assert a set of values; as a result of new reproductive technologies; or to gain status. In adjusting to pressures or goals, women have not always acted, or been able to act, in the interests of their own health, identity, or status. As this article will demonstrate, women, in the short or long run, may attempt to preserve status at the cost of other values such as health. This may occur through conscious and critical choice or through less conscious processes in reaction to relatively larger forces whose impact has not been critically analyzed. With the awareness in the 1980s in the United States of an emergent and incurable sexually transmissible infection, HIV, it would have been anticipated that a new sexual caution may have appeared. Yet, across several research projects in the late 1990s and into the 21st century, as our research team interviewed youth in a high HIV seroprevalence neighborhood in New York City about HIV prevention, we began to hear that a substantial minority of young women and men were participating in social settings for sexual behavior that (1) put youth at risk for HIV; (2) appeared to be motivated by acquisition of status ("props," "points"); and (3) offered few ways for women to win in these status games. We estimate from one random dwelling unit sample that about one in eight youth have been present in these settings and half of them have participated in risky sexual behavior in such settings. The settings are often characterized by men's publicly offhand attitudes toward sexual encounters, are organized around men's status maintenance, and evidence peer pressures that are poorly understood by both young men and women participants. To regain status, some women participants have adopted attitudes more characteristic of men.