Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Problem Statement: Social scientific analyses of poor health outcomes among 14W positive
African American women focus primarily on access to health care and anti-retroviral therapies.
Such studies leaved unexamined experiences of survival with HIV disease among women
receiving health care and supportive services. While federally funded social programs seek to
increase Black women's access to and retention in health care and supportive programs, they
remain at increased risk for HIV-related mortality. Through a research design focused on
ethnographic examination of the interactions among macro-level policy and the micro-level
contexts of lived experience, this ethnographic project illuminates the social processes
circumscribing survival with HIV disease, making clear the institutional and daily life contexts of
HIV positive African American women's lives.
Methods and Analysis: This research uses multiple methods of data collection. In-depth
interviewing (30-40 participants) and participant observation (6 participants) with African
American women of varying socioeconomic circumstances will examine the daily life conditions
under which study participants utilize programmatic services, and the social and economic
processes shaping participants' experiences and perceptions of survival with l-{IV disease.
Interviews will also be conducted with women of other racial/ethnic backgrounds (6-8) as a way
to attend to sources of variability, other than socioeconomic context, among women. Interviews
with service providers (10-15 participants) and participant observation among a federally-funded
HIV health coalition will focus on providing an institutional context that is responsive to the
perspectives of service providers and the ways in which federal funding provisions and policy
procedures shape the available range of health services. Data will be analyzed with respect to the
interactions among three key relationships: living conditions and health needs, services reception
and experiences and perceptions of survival, and federal and state policy and the structure and
content of AIDS services.
Intellectual Merit: Using a political economic medical anthropology and intersectionality
theoretical framework, this study addresses how the meanings of race are revealed through health
circumstances. This theoretical framework makes central the range of conditions under which
participants navigate health and survival. Teasing out the relationships among federal and state
policy, the socioeconomic contexts of women's lives, and experiences with survival, the research
is designed to explore the differences among African American women receiving health services
while sustaining focus on the social processes shaping women's social locations as women of
color within the institutional context of AIDS care and support services.
Broader Impacts: Because the experiences of African American receiving health services are
underrepresented in analyses of HIV health disparities and service provision outcomes, this
research deepens understandings of their struggles to maintain and/or recover health. By
explicating the range of living conditions and experiences among Black women living with WV
disease, this research can inform local strategies for improving the provision of current support
services as well as efforts to build new health programs aimed at alleviating disparities in HIV
health.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 8/15/08 → 7/31/09 |
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