Young adult African-Americans are at disproportionate risk for HIV and have not been reached with effective HIV prevention interventions. Although some HIV prevention programs target African-Americans, most efforts focus on women whose risk for hIV is often conferred by the behavior of their male sexual partners rather than their own behavior. An effective, culturally appropriate hIV prevention intervention for African-American men in urgently needed. Social marketing, the application of marketing technology to public health, has been used successfully to promote many health-related behaviors but needs to be further studied as an intervention to increase condom use for HIV prevention in the United States. We propose to develop, implement, and evaluate a community-level social marketing intervention to increase condom use and improve attitudes and social norms related to condom use among 18- to 29- year old African- American men. We will: . Develop a comprehensive condom social marketing intervention specifically tailored to the needs, as defined by our previous research and through extensive formative research, of young African-American men. . Evaluate the intervention with a quasi-experimental design comparing changes in condom use, attitudes regarding condom use, social norms, and perceived accessibility of condoms in the intervention community and in a comparison community. . Through the identification of attitudinal and other correlates of behavior change, further describe the social and psychological mechanisms whereby social marketing works to change behavior. We will develop the intervention with the extensive use of formative research, including surveys, focus groups, and media reaction interviews. The intervention will include an advertising campaign using television, radio, billboards and point-of-purchase displays to increase condom use, improve social norms and attitudes regarding condom use, and stimulate condom sales. It will include a retailer intervention to increase the availability and attractiveness of condoms by promoting an Afroentric condom brand. We will evaluate the intervention using cross-sectional telephone surveys, including two as baseline, one right after the intervention and one 12 months later. We will evaluate the retailer intervention by analyzing sales data and other observational techniques. We will follow trends in reportable sexually transmitted diseases in the intervention and comparison communities to assess the overall public health impact of our intervention.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 308 publications
