Conference on Behavior Change in the Era of HIV

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests funding for a scientific conference (Organizers Drs. Albarracin, del Rio, DiClemente, and Rothman) titled Theoretical Integration of HIV-Relevant Behavior Change Across Individuals, Family/Couple, and Community/Social Structures. The main goal of the conference is to generate an integrative theory (i.e., set of statements purported to provide a necessary and sufficient explanation of a complex phenomenon) of behavior change that takes into account various systems relevant to HIV prevention (i.e., the individual, the family/couple, the community/broader structural issues) and that addresses how the different levels influence individual behavior and clinical outcomes. This integration requires synthesizing research findings and inferring general principles that can inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of HIV prevention interventions. Relevant questions to be examined include: What are the limitations of current behavior change interventions? How could their impact be larger? What is the impact of family- and community-level interventions on the individual- level beliefs, emotions, and/or behaviors that can ultimately lead to change? What are the mediators and moderators of this impact? What are the reciprocal relations between changes in the individual and the broader systems? How can we explain these reciprocal relations? What techniques can produce change initiated at different levels? How can interventions at different levels be combined or designed to be complementary so that they effectively promote and sustain behavior change? What are the principles that guide such combinations? A first-rate cadre of 40 researchers from basic and applied areas (including women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities) will work towards this integration, make a presentation at the conference, work collaboratively with other scientists to produce a report, and publish a journal issue reporting their joint contribution. The organizers are active researchers in the social, medical, and behavioral sciences and have extensive conference-organizing and theory-building experience; they will lead the pre- and post-conference work, as well as the dissemination of the theoretical integration via journal articles, symposia at other conferences, a report, and a press release. The conference will be 3 days filled with presentations led by specially formed workgroups. Some teams will address the integration from particular starting points (e.g., Migration, poverty, gender, and race as structural conditions linked to belief and behavior change), whereas others will be in charge of synthesizing relations across the different intervening systems. The conference will advance the science of HIV prevention by providing the proposed theoretical integration, which is documented to likely influence the scientific literature as well as efficacious and innovative HIV behavior change intervention strategies. The conference is timely given an examination of the influence of prior theoretical integrations in the area of HIV and current advances in biological methods to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS. It is also timely given the current NIMH agenda of understanding structural health inequalities, fostering researchers' interactions surrounding translational research, and advancing the study of health promotion from different levels of analysis. The conference location is Atlanta, GA, and offers advantages for the cost of the project, the recruitment of the audience of researchers, community members, and policy-makers. There is ample minority representation in the team of organizers and among the speakers. A conference with a team of leading researchers is proposed to help design an integrative theory that will maximize the development of effective and innovative interventions to change HIV-related behaviors. The contributions of the individual, the family, and the community will be analyzed to understand how to maximize the favorable impacts of interventions at all these levels. Various clinical outcomes are emphasized, which are relevant to prevention and treatment of many existing diseases.