ATLANTA – Women who perceive themselves to be stable in terms of factors
such as housing, employment and income may be less likely to engage in risky
sexual behaviors, according to findings presented at the 2009 National HIV
Prevention Conference.
Results of the study, which involved 409 low-income urban women and members of
their female social network, were presented by Danielle German PhD, MPH, of the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“Factors like homelessness, incarceration, employment, social isolation and
transience impact each other,” German said. “We attempted to separate them out.”
All participants were interviewed after they had completed a 12-month HIV
prevention intervention program in Baltimore. “Before we began the study and
once we started conducting interviews, we heard a common language with common
terms: chaos, constant uncertainty, instability, difficulty in taking things for
granted, a feeling of being out of control,” she said. “We wanted to measure
this feeling of chaos versus what is actually happening in those circumstances.”
German and her colleagues developed a set of five items based on psychometric
tests. The researchers sought to determine how well the items on the list of
perceived stability factors related to each other and how this scale related to
other similar measures of HIV risk.
Higher perceived stability was associated with several objective indicators of
social stability, including housing stability, employment, residential
transience and higher income, according to the findings.
Using age and education as control factors, associations between higher
perceived stability and decreased likelihood of multiple sexual partners, sex
exchange, sex while high and any partner risk were observed.
“On top of these findings, we found that drug use and depression also were
associated with higher levels of uncertainty,” German said.
German said that a brief scale of perceived stability may be effective in
conducting HIV prevention research and evaluation efforts. This scale also may
more effectively assess the needs of individuals in social service settings. “A
measure of perceived stability was actually aligned with actual instability in
the lives of our participants,” she said. “We then found that actual chaos was
associated with a higher risk. A focus on addressing factors that contribute to
perceived stability may reduce sexual risk behaviors.”
Source : The Pediatric SuperSite
