Resetting Beliefs about HIV Risk among Low-Income South African Teens: Abstract

"We designed a simple, interactive computer-based intervention to provide HIV relative risk information with tailored feedback..."

The focus of this Empowering New Generations to Improve Nutrition and Economic opportunities (ENGINE) presentation for the International SBCC Summit 2016, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, February 8-10, describes a computer-based intervention to provide HIV relative risk information to youth in South Africa.

From the abstract:
"Adolescent girls are 2-4 times more likely than adolescent boys in South Africa to be HIV positive, with age-disparate partnerships posited as being one determinant. While standard approaches to this problem entail changing motivations or providing economic incentives, formative research showed that a flawed mental model of the HIV profiles – adolescent girls believing older men were safer sexual partners – was a factor driving these behaviors. We designed a simple, interactive computer-based intervention to provide HIV relative risk information with tailored feedback: a "HIV risk game." We ran a randomized controlled trial with 156 youth aged 15-19 to test the effectiveness of our approach as a way of resetting beliefs about HIV.

Key Highlights:
We found that the treatment group was significantly more likely to correctly identify which of two hypothetical individuals of different ages is more likely to have HIV after playing the game, (76-80 percent treatment versus 30-63 percent control). The treatment group also answered twice as many questions correctly (63 percent) than those in the control group (28 percent). The effects persisted over the subsequent 3 months."