Premium
Multilevel Perspectives on Community Intervention: An Example from an Indo‐US HIV Prevention Project in Mumbai, India
Author(s) -
Schensul Stephen L.,
Saggurti Niranjan,
Singh Rajendra,
Verma Ravi K.,
Nastasi Bonnie K.,
Mazumder Papiya Guha
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
american journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.113
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1573-2770
pISSN - 0091-0562
DOI - 10.1007/s10464-009-9241-0
Subject(s) - psychological intervention , intervention (counseling) , formative assessment , health psychology , context (archaeology) , sociology , psychology , public health , public relations , medicine , political science , nursing , pedagogy , geography , archaeology , psychiatry
This paper explores the meaning and applicability of multilevel interventions and the role of ethnography in identifying intervention opportunities and accounting for research design limitations. It utilizes as a case example the data and experiences from a 6‐year, NIMH‐funded, intervention to prevent HIV/STI among married men in urban poor communities in Mumbai, India. The experiences generated by this project illustrate the need for multilevel interventions to include: (1) ethnographically driven formative research to delineate appropriate levels, stakeholders and collaborators; (2) identification of ways to link interventions to the local culture and community context; (3) the development of a model of intervention that is sufficiently flexible to be consistently applied to different intervention levels using comparable culturally congruent concepts and approaches; (4) mechanisms to involve community residents, community based organizations and community‐based institutions; and (5) approaches to data collection that can evaluate the impact of the project on multiple intersecting levels.