Barbershop Talk: HIV Prevention for African American Heterosexual Men

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The burden of HIV infection among men and women who identify as Black or African American in the U.S. is enormous, given that over half of all new HIV diagnoses occur in this group. Heterosexual contact accounts for much of this transmission, yet a large gap exists between the HIV prevention needs of adult heterosexual African American men and programs that have been demonstrated to meet these needs. Investigators at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, Inc. in Brooklyn NY have over ten years experience working together on local community based health education initiatives, behavioral interventions, and action oriented projects. More recently, the investigative team involved in this partnership has utilized CBPR methods to develop an intervention that seeks to reduce sexual risk behavior among Black (including African, African American, and African Caribbean) heterosexual adult men who do not inject drugs. Our aims are to assess the impact of this linguistically and culturally tailored HIV prevenfion program on the sexual risk of heterosexual, African American men aged 21 and older, to assess the intervention's impact on the more proximal social and psychological variables that the program is designed to change, and to identify key contexual level factors that may Impact the intervention's impact across segments of this priority population. This intervention is consistent with the 2011 Trans-NIH Plan for HIVRelated Research, which has as a priority the reduction of HIV-related disparities in racial and ethnic populations, addresses the needs of a population who bear a disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS and for whom there are few effective approaches available, and will contribute to the evidence-based surrounding the efficacy of sustainable, acceptable approaches to risk reduction among African American men.