SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE AIDS INTERVENTION FOR HIGH RISK YOUTH

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The primary career goal of the candidate is to reduce HIV infection of gay youth. Since prevalence data indicate dramatic differences in AIDS-risk by race-ethnicity for young gay men, an additional goal is to develop interventions which are specific to two racial-ethnic gay youth populations: African American and white to achieve this goal, the candidate wishes to accomplish the following career development objectives: 1) to development skills in model building and hypothesis generation based on qualitative data, 2) to augment command of the health science literature with a detailed grasp of methods of disciplines such as psychology and sociology which develop models and test hypotheses related to social action, 3) to develop expertise in grounded theory methods of textual data analysis, 4) to develop advanced skills in the use of the research methods of cognitive anthropology and 5) to develop expertise in designing and implementing AIDS interventions for gay youth based on ethnographic data. It is hypothesized that intentions generated from reasoning in which sex is construed by subjects as a social behavior facilitate or interfere with subjects' health-related intentions. Ethnographic research will allow development of constructs which can predict this interaction and allow it to be manipulated. Five major phases of the research are proposed. First, a general model of social knowledge related to sex (SKS) of adolescents will be developed through analysis of an existing set of transcribed interviews with African American, white, and other heterosexual adolescents which contains substantial data on SKS. The second phase will be t conduct two parallel ethnographic studies of African American and white gay youth in order to develop specific SKS constructs for these two groups. Out of these studies will emerge a set of intervention materials which will be tested in a third phase. The fourth phase will be to implement a community-based intervention which will use an existing intervention as a control and the same intervention with SKS constructs added as the experiment. The fifth phase will be to evaluate these interventions.