The purpose of this four-year longitudinal project is to assess the effect of long term education and counseling with drug addicted women at risk for HIV infection and their significant others. Four programs of variable length and involvement with significant others will be evaluated. The traditional counseling program will provide factual information on AIDS for minority women individually (Control group 1) or minority women and their significant other (Control group 2) at three time intervals over a twelve- month period. The specialized counseling programs will provide the same factual information as the traditional counseling program, and coping assessment and enhancement strategies. This program will be provided in eight weekly visits and at six and twelve months to the women individually (Experimental Group 1) or to the women and their significant others (Experimental Group 2). All programs will draw blood for HIV testing at six, twelve and twenty-four month follow-up. A culturally sensitive, reliable and valid Coping Assessment Instrument Packet (CAIP) will be utilized for the pretest and the six, twelve and twenty-four month posttest assessment of coping outcome as measured by: 1) decreased utilization of high risk behaviors, 2) increased utilization of risk reducing behaviors, 3) increased knowledge and utilization of quality coping responses, 4) decreased emotional and physical distress experienced, 5) increased knowledge and utilization of personal and community resources, 6) improvement in knowledge and attitudes of AIDS and HIV infection, and 7) reduced seropositivity. The relationship between the counseling programs (independent variables), the factors affecting coping (mediating variables) and coping outcome will be evaluated. A comparison of the four counseling programs will be performed. It is hypothesized that there will be no significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pretest measures of factors affecting coping and coping outcome but there will be significant differences between the experimental and control group in the posttest measures of factors affecting coping and coping outcome. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that there will be significant differences between experimental group 1 and experimental group 2 in the posttest measures of coping outcome. A similar difference would be seen between the two control groups. In this study, 200 high risk Black and Hispanic women and their 200 significant others will be randomly assigned to the experimental or control groups.
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