This three-year research project involves a cultural anthropologist from the University of Miami creating a value utilization/norm change (VUNC) model among 10th and 11th grade Zambian public secondary school students. The model will be developed from ethnography, domain analysis including systematic interviewing, free listing, pile sorting, rank-order tests for core values and social norms, consensus analysis, a planned intervention, peer leader training, and assessment. The study focuses on values and norms pertaining to health and sexuality among adolescents to shape sexual behavior change (i.e., maintaining abstinence or encouraging safer sex practices). The VUNC model will be tested with focus groups and interviews to establish the strength of consensus on these moral and social values and beliefs, then an intervention will be designed to use the values and strengthen or change the norms for the desired sexual behavior change. Peer leaders will be trained to apply the intervention on a sample of male and female students. A sample of 154 students will be selected, half to be a control and half to be the intervention group. The latter will attend workshops which focus on providing information and strengthening norms. At the end of the study all informants will be interviewed and tested to evaluate the intervention. This research is important because it will provide a test of a strategy to develop and use an intervention based on norms and values to change adolescent sexual behavior. This study will be valuable to decision makers and health planners to develop programs to limit the prevalence of STDs. While this project is one case study, the issues will be generalizeable to other situations of concern about adolescent's risk of disease.
