Title
Assessing HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination in developing countries
Date Issued
01 September 2008
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Abstract
HIV/AIDS-related stigma and discrimination are barriers to HIV prevention effectiveness, voluntary counseling and testing uptake, and accessing care in many international settings. Most published stigma scales are not comprehensive and have been primarily tested in developed countries. We sought to draw on existing literature to develop a scale with strong psychometric properties that could easily be used in developing countries. From 82 compiled questions, we tested a 50-item scale which yielded 3 dimensions with 22 items in pilot testing in rural northern Thailand (n = 200) and urban and peri-urban Zimbabwe (n = 221). The three factors (shame, blame and social isolation; perceived discrimination; equity) had high internal consistency reliability and good divergent validity in both research settings. Systematic and significant differences in stigmatizing attitudes were found across countries, with few differences by age or sex noted within sites. This short, comprehensive and standardized measure can be easily incorporated into questionnaires in international research settings. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Start page
772
End page
780
Volume
12
Issue
5
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias socio biomédicas (planificación familiar, salud sexual, efectos políticos y sociales de la investigación biomédica)
Enfermedades infecciosas
Inmunología
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-50049127668
PubMed ID
Source
AIDS and Behavior
ISSN of the container
10907165
Sponsor(s)
Acknowledgements This study was supported in part by the National Institutes of Mental Health (Grant numbers 5U01 MH066687 and 5U01 MH066702). The authors would like to acknowledge the Project Accept Study team and the study participants.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases U01AI069406
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus