Under the project Epidemiology of Alcohol: Risk of AIDS (NIAAA R01 AA08564) our goal in the past five years has been to explore how drinking behaviors are associated with sexual risk behaviors. In that time period, six surveys (two on local samples and four on national samples) and several experimental studies were designed and carried out to test this association. The purpose of this application is to continue our epidemiological and theoretical research on drinking and sexual risk behavior while making the findings more explicitly relevant to the development of prevention and intervention efforts around AIDS and other STDs. To this end, we propose to consider sexually transmitted disease outcomes in pursuing the association between drinking behaviors and sexual risk behaviors.
The specific aims detailed below will be addressed through: 1) the collection of data on drinking and sexual risk behavior in conjunction with the Alcohol Research Group's (ARG) 1995 National Alcohol Survey (proposed n=2000), 2) an interview and medical record study of 1050 patients in Alameda County's Public Health STD clinics, and 3) continuing analysis of selected data in existing ARG data sets.
Specific aims are: (A) To investigate which aspects of drinking are associated with higher and prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. (B) To investigate which aspects of sexual risk behavior are associated with higher incidence and prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. (C) To build models of the association of drinking, sexual risk behavior and STD outcomes using cross-sectional and longitudinal data. (D) To investigate epidemiological variations in these models as a function of gender, age, and ethnicity and other demographic factors. (E) To investigate theoretical explanation for the association of drinking, sexual risk behaviors, and STD outcomes, such as common causality by """"""""third variables factors (problem behavior, and anti-social personality, impulsivity, situational factors). (F) And, finally, to bridge the gap between research and prevention by investigating the applicability of the Theory of Planned Behavior to understanding STD outcomes under problematic and non-problematic circumstances.
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