The Effect of Educational Intervention on Attitude of African American College Students Towards People Living with HIV

Abstract

HIV still continues to be a major health crisis around the world after three decades. Considering this, one of the foci of a global health measure should be towards the management of HIV for those people who are afflicted and protection of others. One aspect of this management is to decrease stigma for the people diagnosed with HIV by changing the attitude of general population towards HIV. This effort is most important for young adult African-Americans, who hold a significant burden of HIV diagnoses and mortality. We have observed that providing informative material on HIV and reminding African-American psychology undergraduates each week with a pop quiz lead to significant decrease in negative attitude towards people living with HIV in a month as measured by a 28-question scale as compared to a control group where no education was provided. These results suggest that we need to explore educational measures that fit specific populations to control HIV stigma and attitude towards people living with HIV/AIDS.