2015 APHA Annual Meeting & Expo

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Recorded Annual Meeting Presentations (RAMP) are now available for purchase.
Only $90 for presenters, $140 for registered attendees and $200 for non-attendees.

Online Program

337221
HIV - Realization - A message to you from Boston youth


Wednesday, November 4, 2015 : 8:59 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.

Yulin Hswen, MPH, Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Health Communications Concentration, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA
David Bickham, PhD, Center on Media and Child Health, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA
Background: African American teens experience elevated risk for HIV compared to Whites, and should be included in designing culturally relevant prevention efforts. We developed and pilot tested a participatory method to engage African American teens in co-creating HIV prevention videos using YouTube, a popular video sharing social media website.

Program Framework and Implementation:. Our program curriculum emphasized HIV education, use of social media, and video production, and involved working with African American teens to foster ownership in designing and producing HIV prevention videos through YouTube. We partnered with the Boston Area Health Education Center to conduct two sequential pilot evaluations of this program in 2013 and 2014. Through an iterative process, we collected feedback from participants and community partners to assess program feasibility, acceptability, and to refine the curriculum.

Outcomes: We enrolled 19 teens, ages 16-18 (8 in the first pilot and 11 in the second pilot). Participating teens worked together to create three HIV prevention videos. Overall, teens reported high satisfaction with the program content and enjoyed using YouTube to co-create health communication messages. The program emerged as highly feasible, and something the community center would like to continue to deliver.

Conclusions: This program required few resources and used social media to appeal to today’s youth, highlighting that it could be delivered across diverse community settings. This participatory approach appears to empower youth, which is particularly important for advancing HIV prevention efforts among at-risk African American teens. The impact of this approach on health behaviors must be explored.

Learning Areas:

Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Communication and informatics
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Diversity and culture
Public health or related research
Social and behavioral sciences

Learning Objectives:
Describe a community-participatory method to develop culturally sensitive health-related communication messages Design a public service campaign by and for African American youth

Keyword(s): Diversity and culture

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have been the co-principal of several HIV prevention grants that seek to reduce HIV/AIDS risk related behaviors in at-risk youth through social media. My research focuses around the development of community based communication strategies for preventing at-risk behaviors among disadvantaged minority youth populations.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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