This project will develop and conduct a national survey of public knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors relevant to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS, and will monitor changes in public response to AIDS over the course of one year. The principal goals of the research are: 1) to identify areas of public knowledge and ignorance about AIDS that are most likely to affect personal decisions to engage in at-risk behavior; 2) to describe attitudes toward various AIDS-related policies and toward persons with AIDS and members of risk groups; 3) to identify social psychological processes underlying public reactions to AIDS; 4) to incorporate all of this information into recommendations for the most effective approaches to be taken in AIDS-education programs; 5) to disseminate these findings and recommendations to a wide audience of persons involved with AIDS-education, research, and policy. Data will be collected through telephone surveys of a national probability sample of American adults, and through personal interviews with a national sample of American adolescents. Both groups will include large subsamples of blacks and Hispanics. The approach to be used in the proposed research will combine the advantages of large-scale surveys with social-psychological questionnaire studies. It will utilize social science perspective on attitudes, inference, and social cognition to develop hypotheses and operationalize concepts, and will yield results generalizable to the American public. Additionally, the research will improve upon earlier studies by devoting special attention to AIDS-related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors among groups previously neglected in national surveys: adolescents and black and Hispanic adults. The research will also include a panel-study component to permit longitudinal analysis of trends in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior-change; one half of the initial respondents will be re- interviewed 12 months after the first survey, along with an equal number of new respondents. Results from the research will be disseminated through a variety of channels at regular intervals. In addition to presentations at professional meetings and academic journals, this will include preparation of articles for popular and trade publications, release of results to news organizations, and distribution of working papers.
| Herek, G M; Capitanio, J P (1993) Public reactions to AIDS in the United States: a second decade of stigma. Am J Public Health 83:574-7 |
