 |
The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
|
The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Deborah J. Kayman, CSW, NDRI, Inc., 71 West 23 Street, New York, NY 10010, 212-845-4443, kayman@ndri.org, Marjorie F. Goldstein, PhD, National Development and Research Institutes, Inc, 71 West 23 Street, New York, NY 10010, and Sherry Deren, PhD, National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., 71 West 23rd Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10010.
The more times a person succeeds in completing a task, the greater the confidence s/he feels about his or her ability to do it. This confidence is known as self efficacy. In the present study, newcomers to methadone treatment were asked about their self efficacy in regard to reducing the risk of exposing themselves or others to HIV, a virus which is transmitted through sexual intercourse and the sharing of drug injection equipment. Methadone consumers are at high risk for HIV through both kinds of activity. The present study asks whether HIV self efficacy is related to gender and race. If this or another pattern of low self efficacy can be predicted among methadone consumers, methadone treatment staff can make targeted interventions to strengthen self efficacy and thereby help to reduce the consumer’s risk of exposure to HIV. The 338 study subjects were New York City residents who were interviewed immediately after completing intake for a hospital-based program with multiple treatment sites. The interviews, which took over an hour to complete, included the Addiction Severity Index and several other, briefer scales. The self efficacy scale consisted of eleven items, three of which asked about injection risk, while the remainder asked about sex risk. Significant differences were found in mean self efficacy scores for men and women, injectors and non-injectors, and for the three racial categories represented in the sample. The implications of these differences for social work intervention will be discussed.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: HIV Risk Behavior, Self-Efficacy
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.