Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Efficacy of an HIV Prevention Intervention for Older Black Women

ABSTRACT Black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV, making up less than 15% of the female population yet accounting for half of new HIV infections in women in the United States. While both younger and older Black women engage in high-risk sexual behaviors, older Black women are not concerned with pregnancy prevention and are less likely to use condoms which places them at risk for contracting HIV. Also, older Black women are often overlooked when it comes to HIV prevention services, due to ageism and stigma about high-risk behaviors among older adults, and lack of an empirical base about their sexual behavior. Dr. Laneshia Conner, a junior faculty member in the College of Social Work at the University of Kentucky, is in active pursuit of developing her research skills to become an independent researcher through further training in community engagement, mixed-methods analyses, implementation science, and professional development by mentors who are well funded by NIH and have a history of training early career faculty members. Through the proposed research strategy and training plan for this K01 Career Development Award through NIA, Dr. Conner will acquire skills to launch her research program in four areas: community-engaged research among older adults, mixed methods research, intervention development, and expansion of professional skills for a successful research career. The proposed project will revise and implement the Woman 2 Woman (W2W) intervention, after it is adapted to address unique gaps in HIV prevention that target older Black women. Working with two low-income housing complexes for adults over the age of 50 and a community center that serves the Black community, older Black women will be recruited to participate in a multisession, group-level behavioral intervention adapted to address both physiological risk as well as low perception of risk. High unknown serostatus suggest that HIV prevalence may be higher than reported among older adults. The overall objective of this innovative project is to add reproductive health histories as an intervention component of Woman to Woman (W2W), an HIV intervention for older Black. Specific aims are: (1) Revise the W2W intervention for older Black women to identify and incorporate key reproductive health history themes, and (2) Implement the revised W2W group-level intervention for older Black women to evaluate feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy through a small, pilot RCT. This project provides an intervention manualized protocol on how to adapt an HIV prevention intervention for older Black women; and preliminary data on the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the intervention outcomes. Secondly, implementation and assessment procedures will inform a subsequent full-scale R01 randomized clinical trial. Lastly, health disparities researcher, Dr. Conner, will complete career development opportunities that align with development an intervention of HIV risk reduction among older Black women.