Risk Factors for HIV Among Urban African American Youth

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The candidate is a sociologist, and a former recipient of a Minority Investigator Award from NIDA, with knowledge and experience regarding community and environmental factors and their relationship to youth involvement in health-compromising behaviors in urban areas. The Social Research Center (SRC), where the candidate is currently employed as a research scientist, is the research campus of Friends Research Institute (FRI), a private non-profit institution established in 1955. The Center promotes pre-doctoral training experiences designed to facilitate careers in behavioral, public health, and public policy research, providing entry-level positions for talented graduate and undergraduate students in the behavioral sciences. The candidate's long-term career objective is to become an independent investigator. He would like to focus his professional career on developing and testing intervention models that place urban African American youth and adults at-risk for HIV/AIDS. The candidate proposes to be mentored by his primary sponsor Dr. Jeannette Johnson, a Native American, cross-cultural psychologist, who has extensive prevention research knowledge and expertise regarding individual, social, and cultural risk and protective factors associated with HIV/AIDS in minority communities. During the mentored phase, he also proposes to take courses regarding HIV/AIDS at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at John's Hopkins University and attend NIH and other HIV/AIDS related conferences. The primary aim of the proposed three-year cross-sectional study is to examine the extent to which specific risk and protective factors predict both perceptions of HIV risk and participation in risky sexual behavior among high-risk African American youth. These youth, currently attending Baltimore City Alternative Learning Centers (BCALC), have been expelled from traditional public schools for committing violent acts or for engaging in other serious infractions, with many engaging in risky sexual behavior. Half of the participants will be assessed the first project year and the remainder assessed in the second year. Participants will be 200 male and female students, between the ages of 11 and 17 randomly selected from two BCALC school sites. Assessment data will be collected from January through May during each of the two data collection years. The research study proposed has the potential to provide a greater understanding of issues related to perceptions of HIV risk and participation in risky sexual behaviors among high-risk urban African American youth. Findings from the study will be of significance to the field of public health by filling important knowledge gaps in terms of risk for HIV infection among such youth.