Public health programs in developing countries would be more effective if they possessed a better understanding of the religious beliefs and practices through which those programs will be filtered or otherwise appropriated. This application is in response to the NIH/NICHD program mission to examine religious and spiritual beliefs that influence sexual behaviors that may facilitate the transmission of HIV in children and adolescents. The study will map aspects of religiosity and spirituality in Botswana Pentecostal teenagers that help them maintain and protect their health from HIV/AIDS, and that would be the basis of a faith-based HIV prevention curriculum for use by the Pentecostal faith community with its teenage congregates. It proposes to use state-of-the-art concept mapping techniques to construct the components and content a prospective faith-based HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum for use by similar faith-based organizations (FBOs). Concept mapping is a mixed method approach that enables the construction of psychosocial constructs from the informants'world views to generate a theory of the informant's core perspectives on the phenomenon of interest. To achieve the aforesaid goals, Pennsylvania State University (PSU) faculty will work with faculty at the University of Botswana (UB) and Christ Citadel Church International, a major Pentecostal church in Botswana to conceptually map locally constructed components and content for a faith-oriented HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum. It is expected that the proposed project will also (a) lay the basis for a sustainable partnership with faith-based organizations in HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum development between the PSU, UB, and public health agencies involved in HIV/AIDS prevention with teenagers;(b) build into the faith-based HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum gender focused supports while also providing universal supports;(c) contribute to human and institutional capacity building in Botswana in HIV/AIDS prevention with teenagers;and (d) provide preliminary evidence for a full scale curriculum development effort with a clinical trial of the curriculum in related faith communities in Botswana. The prospective faith-based HIV/AIDS curriculum could be integrated into comprehensive structural prevention interventions in which evidence-based faith- based or spiritual-oriented interventions are available and accessible to youths who would benefit from such interventions. This project will document the feasibility of using concept mapping to construct a faith-based curriculum for HIV/AIDS prevention for use in Botswana. Our preliminary faith-based curriculum applying a participatory approach will be consumer driven in content and goals, context sensitive, and with a high level of fidelity.
The structure and of religious beliefs and practices for health are incompletely understood (Thoresen &Harris, 2002), and their specific representation in African youths unknown. Yet, an overwhelming majority of African youths hold religious beliefs they believe to define their selfhood and to explain their health status, including vulnerability to disease (Addai, 2000;Chikwendu, 2004). The study will construct faith-based constructs useful for designing HIV prevention interventions with a faith- based organization, and with potential for adoption by public health initiatives that involve faith communities as partners.
| Mpofu, Elias; Nkomazana, Fidelis; Muchado, Jabulani A et al. (2014) Faith and HIV prevention: the conceptual framing of HIV prevention among Pentecostal Batswana teenagers. BMC Public Health 14:225 |
