January 29, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A Rutgers University professor thinks that cellphone soap operas could be a powerful tool to encourage young minority women to take steps to protect themselves from HIV infection.
The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, in Millburn, gave Rachel Jones a $154,400 grant to create 12 videos that dramatize the relationship dynamics that often make it difficult for young women to insist that their partners use a condom or to ask them to get tested for AIDS; the videos also show how women might overcome those challenges.
Ms. Jones hopes that creating the videos for cellphones will help reach the largest possible audience, as well as give viewers more privacy when watching them than if they were available only on a computer.
The decision to focus on power dynamics in romantic relationships, says Ms. Jones, grew out of research that she had conducted.
For a long time, she says, researchers believed women engaged in unprotected sex because they trusted that their partner was monogamous.
But Ms. Jones says that in studies she conducted among young black and Hispanic women ages 18 to 29, she found that more than half of the women surveyed believed that their partner was having sex with other women. Yet of those women, 35 percent continued to have unprotected sex with that partner.
“It isn’t so much that women trust their partner when they perceive he’s engaging in risk behaviors, it’s that they feel the pressure to show trust,” says Ms. Jones.
The scripts for the 20-minute cellphone videos — as well as for a pilot video — are based on stories that young black and Hispanic women told in meetings at neighborhood centers and public-housing complexes in Newark and Jersey City.
At those sessions, says Ms. Jones, some women talked about not using condoms with an unfaithful partner because they wanted to hold onto the relationship or didn’t feel like they had other alternatives. But others talked about ways to avoid situations that put them at risk for sexually transmitted diseases.
“We saw women’s wisdom in reducing risk,” says Ms. Jones. “We saw women sitting right next to each other in the same focus groups, in the same communities, who had the answers and those who were engaging in high-risk behavior.”
Ms. Jones has also received a $2-million grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research, part of the National Institutes of Health, for a four-year study to determine whether the cellphone videos, which are still being filmed, lead to changes in behavior among viewers.
For more information: Go to http://www.stophiv.newark.rutgers.edu.
