The Impact of Marginalization on the Continuum of Care Treatment Model on African American Communities in the Southern United States

Recently, I was asked to speak at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) Conference about my experiences serving as an ethnographic consultant on the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance System (NHBS1 ) Study. My role on the project involved shadowing the field team and providing an analysis of the data as reported by three sources, specifically focus groups, key informant interviews, and street intercept interviews. Additionally, I was asked to write an ethnographic report and submit it along with the Norfolk Program’s summaries of project activities. This was an interesting assignment for a medical anthropologist, as ethnographic methodologies were a relatively new tactic for this study. In the past, the NHBS solely relied on quantitative analysis of the at-risk behaviors under surveillance.