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A QUESTION MODULE FOR ASSESSING COMMUNITY STIGMA TOWARDS HIV IN RURAL INDIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2012

CAROL VLASSOFF ,
MITCHELL G. WEISS  and
SHOBHA RAO
CAROL VLASSOFF
Affiliation:
Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
MITCHELL G. WEISS
Affiliation:
Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland
SHOBHA RAO
Affiliation:
Department of Biometry and Nutrition, Agharkar Research Institute, Pune, India
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Summary

This paper describes a simple question module to assess community stigma in rural India. Fear of stigma is known to prevent people from seeking HIV testing and to contribute to further disease transmission, yet relatively little attention has been paid to community stigma and ways of measuring it. The module, based on a vignette of a fictional HIV-positive woman, was administered to 494 married women and 186 unmarried male and female adolescents in a village in rural Maharashtra, India. To consider the usefulness of the question module, a series of hypotheses were developed based on the correlations found in other studies between HIV-related stigma and socio-demographic characteristics (age, education, discussion of HIV with others, knowing someone living with HIV, knowledge about its transmission and whether respondents acknowledged stigmatizing attitudes as their own or attributed them to others). Many of the study's hypotheses were confirmed. Among married women, correlates of stigma included older age, lack of discussion of HIV and lack of knowledge about transmission; among adolescents, lower education and lack of discussion of HIV were the most significant correlates. The paper concludes that the question module is a useful tool for investigating the impact of interventions to reduce stigma and augment social support for people living with HIV in rural India.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 359 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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