Women's Empowerment and Sexual Risk in Zambia

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议的博士前奖学金项目将审查妇女的相对赋权的关系及其对妇女的艾滋病毒/性病的风险的影响。赋予妇女权力的干预措施已成为减少妇女性风险的主要方法之一，但其在减少性风险方面的影响的经验证据有限。一种批评是，赋权方案侧重于妇女个人，而不是考虑到她们的男性、家庭和社区关系。这项拟议的研究旨在检验一个被广泛接受的命题，即注重赋权的干预措施在减少赞比亚妇女的性风险方面是有效的。它还试图确定与妇女主要男性伴侣的关系的性质是赋予权力和性风险的一个因素。赞比亚正在经历一场成熟的艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行病对健康、经济和社会的影响，15至49岁的人中艾滋病毒流行率为14.3%。这一流行病影响了社会和经济增长的各个方面，摧毁了个别家庭，削弱了公共部门的各个领域，并威胁到国家的长期发展。因此，迫切需要尽量减少性风险，遏制艾滋病的蔓延。该项目的具体目标是：制定妇女赋权的地方定义，记录Kanyama镇居民可用的赋权方案（赞比亚卢萨卡），确定妇女与男子的主要关系的变化范围，确定干预方案的影响程度及其对赋权和性风险的影响，评估妇女伴侣关系的性质及其与赋权和性风险的关系，并进行多变量分析，确定独立变量和中介变量在预测妇女性风险方面的相对强度。该项目将采用定性（主要信息提供者和深入访谈）和定量（调查工具）方法。该项目旨在提供申请人在获得博士学位后扩大研究补助金所需的形成性研究成果;促进关于增强权能在减少性风险方面的作用的现有研究;并生成可以对赞比亚妇女的健康和福祉产生积极影响的数据。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed pre-doctoral fellowship project will examine the relationship of women's relative empowerment and its impact on women's risk of HIV/STD. Empowerment interventions with women have become one of the major approaches to women's sexual risk reduction, yet the empirical evidence of its impact in reducing sexual risk is limited. One critique is that empowerment programs are focused on women as individuals rather than taking into account their male, familial and community relationships. This proposed research seeks to test the widely accepted proposition that interventions that focus on empowerment are effective in reducing Zambian women's sexual risk. It also seeks to identify the nature of the relationship with women's primary male partner as a factor in both empowerment and sexual risk. Zambia is experiencing the health, economic, and social impacts of a mature HIV/AIDS epidemic, with a HIV prevalence of 14.3% for individuals between the ages of 15 and 49. The epidemic has affected all aspects of the social and economic growth and has devastated individual families, weakened all areas of the public sector, and threatened the long-term national development. Hence the need to minimize sexual risk and curb the spread of the epidemic is pressing. The specific aims of this project are to: develop a local definition of women's empowerment, document the empowerment programs available to residents in the Kanyama township (Lusaka, Zambia), identify the range of variation in women's primary relationships with men, identify the level of exposure to intervention programs and its impact on both empowerment and sexual risk, assess the nature of women's partner relationship and its relationship to empowerment and sexual risk and conduct a multivariate analysis that identifies the relative strength of independent and mediating variables in predicting women's sexual risk. The project will employ both qualitative (key informant and in-depth interviewing) and quantitative (survey instrument) methods. This project is intended to provide the formative research results needed for the development of an expanded research grant by the applicant after her PhD is awarded; to contribute to available research on the role of empowerment in sexual risk reduction; and to generate data that can positively impact on the health and well being of women in Zambia.