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Personal Strategies for HIV Prevention: The Development and Validation of a Strategy‐Coding Instrument 1
Author(s) -
Sanderson Catherine A.,
Maibach Edward,
DiIorio Colleen,
Cantor Nancy
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00151.x
Subject(s) - psychology , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , coding (social sciences) , social psychology , cognition , dimension (graph theory) , safer sex , content validity , developmental psychology , condom , psychometrics , medicine , statistics , mathematics , family medicine , syphilis , neuroscience , pure mathematics
This paper describes the development of a coding instrument to classify college students' strategies for preventing HIV infection, and examines the association of distinct strategies with social cognitive and behavioral measures related to safer sexual behavior. This instrument classifies each strategy into both a content domain (e.g., using condoms, remaining abstinent, limiting sexual partners), and 3 distinct dimensions: commitment, specificity, and effectiveness. We examine the reliability and validity of this instrument by showing the discriminative associations of each dimension with social cognitive and behavioral measures, and demonstrate the differential importance of distinct dimensions in predicting behavior in different content domains. Discussion focuses on the importance of tailoring HIV prevention messages to change strategy dimensions in order to maximize behavior change.