Drug problems and “at risk” women’s involvement in HIV risk behaviors

Kirk Elifson, Hugh Klein () and Claire Sterk

International Journal of Public Health, 2004, vol. 49, issue 3, 198-207

Abstract: Objectives:This paper focuses on two research questions: Is there a relationship between women’s number of drug problems and the extent to which they engage in HIV risk behaviors? What factors influence the extent to which women experience drug-related problems? Methods:This study is based on 250 adult “at risk” women (predominantly African American) in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area. Street outreach efforts, targeted sampling, and ethnographic mapping procedures were used to identify potential study participants. Results:The more drug problems women experienced, the greater their involvement in HIV risk behaviors was. The number of drug problems experienced was a significant contributor to the model predicting women’s HIV risk involvement, along with religiosity, living with substance abusers, and age of first drug use. Depression, optimism, coping with stress, and number of different drugs used predicted the extent to which women experienced drug problems. Conclusions:Drug problems are an important predictor of women’s involvement in HIV risk behaviors. Programs wishing to reduce their risk for contracting HIV should target drug-involved women and help them to stop using drugs. Copyright Birkhäuser-Verlag Basel 2004

Keywords: Drug problems; Drug dependency; Drug abuse; HIV/AIDS; Risk behaviors; Women (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00038-004-3051-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ijphth:v:49:y:2004:i:3:p:198-207

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/00038

DOI: 10.1007/s00038-004-3051-9

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Public Health is currently edited by Thomas Kohlmann, Nino Künzli and Andrea Madarasova Geckova

More articles in International Journal of Public Health from Springer, Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().