Using CBPR to Develop Gender-specific and Culturally-tailored HIV Testing Educational Materials

Issues: A large percentage of current HIV/AIDS diagnoses among African Americans result from HIV infections acquired during young adulthood. In addition, men with a history of arrest and/or incarceration may be at high-risk for HIV infection. Therefore, it is important to provide HIV education and testing to recently arrested and/or incarcerated young adult black men.

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methods are especially useful in creating testing programs for high-risk populations. CBPR promotes a sense of community ‘ownership', resulting in more effective identification of factors that influence testing and enhanced program sustainability.

Description: Preliminary discussions with our community partners identified recently arrested and/or incarcerated young adult black men as an important target group for HIV education and testing materials. Our goal is to develop gender-specific and culturally-tailored materials that promote HIV testing among recently arrested and/or incarcerated young adult black men. We will summarize the techniques used to engage our community partners about our research protocol, appropriateness of our measures, and utility of our program implementation methods.

Lesson Learned: Lessons were learned in our initial collaborations with the community, including the importance of allotting sufficient time to establish relationships, allocating appropriate resources to ensure efforts were feasible, and discussing differences in priorities and research methods.

Recommendations: Partnerships with the community, local agencies, and leaders may lead to the identification and development of more relevant health initiatives and improve their effectiveness, particularly when engaging difficult-to-reach populations, such as recently arrested and/or incarcerated young adult black men.