EAGER: Collaborative Research: Developing a Culturally Compelling Social Network Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention for African American College Students

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The proposed research will advance scientific knowledge about health information dissemination and the design of appropriate social media tools for the African American female college student community. The goal of this project is to broaden access to and utilization of HIV prevention information, thereby strengthening African American organization and individual capacity to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in these communities. The project will achieve this goal the following aims: 1) Describe the ways in which African American female college students construct their cultural/racial identities; 2) Identify the relationship between these identities and the use of smart health information technology and social networking systems by the target user group. The research project will provide empirical evidence on the design and implementation of HIV/AIDS preventive education, as well as the culturally-specific challenges related to the use of Information Computer Technology (ICT) for HIV/AIDS preventive education. It will contribute to understanding how social networks targeting African American female college students for HIV/AIDS prevention are received by the target community and how to improve the design of such tools for optimal effectiveness. This research will have very far-reaching implications for science and health education within and beyond the target research study community. These intellectual contributions will be of interest to scholars in communication and information studies, software engineering, pervasive mobile devices, and smart health information systems and trustworthy computing. The project will engage college students in the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority as both users and participatory designers of social media tools intended to disseminate HIV information. The National Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, an organization with national and international programs for outreach and networking African American women in institutes of higher education, will offer a mechanism to reach additional college students beyond the physical locale of North Carolina State University - thereby providing a network penetration to other North Carolina chapters and beyond for future direction and interdisciplinary, inter-institutional collaborations. More specifically, this research is to broaden access to and utilization of HIV prevention information, thereby strengthening African American organization and individual capacity to address the epidemic in these communities using innovative smart health information technologies.