CORE--BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL STUDIES

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The Behavioral and Social Sciences Core provides a structure for organizing Penn's substantial research capacity in the behavioral and social sciences, and focusing those resources on HIV/AIDS-related research. The goal is to advance AIDS research by facilitating the inclusion of state-of-the-science theoretical and methodological contributions from behavioral and social sciences across the full spectrum of CFAR research. To that end the Core emphasizes A) outreach to the Philadelphia community, particularly to its minority populations, B) case finding to ensure the inclusion of women and minority subjects in CFAR studies, and C) the participation of minority investigators and research staff. Assistance will be provided to CFAR investigators in the following specific areas: 1) design, testing, implementation, and evaluation of theory-driven behavioral interventions; 2) the application of social science research methods including survey construction, measurement of behavior and psychiatric symptoms, social statistics, qualitative methods, program evaluation, cost-benefit analysis, and social policy analysis; 3) maintenance of a community-based research network to facilitate investigator access to community populations and settings such as homeless shelters, public housing, drug treatment centers, primary care clinics, and schools; 4) assistance with case finding and subjective recruitment by maintenance of locator information and participant file with demographic, behavioral risk, and HIV status information on potential research subjects living in the community who are not included in the UPHS clinical data base; 5) vital status determination for subjects lost to follow-up; 6) maintenance of a library of relevant public use data files, and assistance with secondary analysis.