The Impact of Fear, Secrecy, and Stigma on Parental Disclosure of HIV Status to Children: A Qualitative Exploration with HIV Positive Parents Attending an ART Clinic in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
South Africa is one of the sub Saharan countries where considerable progress in providing antiretroviral treatment (ART) has been made. The increased access to ART contributes to improvements in the prognosis of HIV and parents are more likely to raise their children than ever before. The study examined the social context influencing disclosure of parental HIV status to children from the perspectives of fathers and mothers accessing ART from an academic hospital in South Africa. Three focus group interviews were conducted with 26 non-disclosed biological parents of children aged between 7 and 18 years. Their ages ranged between 20-60 years and they cared for a total of 60 children. Parental decision not to disclose their HIV status to children was influenced by the fear of death and dying, the influence of television and media, stigma and discrimination. Parents delayed disclosure of their HIV status to children because children believed that AIDS kills. Parents also feared that the child may not be able to keep the parent's HIV status secret and might result in the family being subjected to stigma, discrimination, and isolation. Fear of stigma and discrimination were also responsible for the continuous efforts by parents to protect their HIV status from their children, family and neighbour's. Parents also delayed disclosure to children because they lacked disclosure skills and needed support for disclosure from health care providers. Healthcare providers are in a unique position to provide such support and guidance and assist parents to disclose and children to cope with parental HIV infection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".