Gendered perceptions of HIV risk among young women and men in a high-HIV-prevalence setting
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has become evident that sexual health and HIV-risk behaviours cannot be addressed effectively without paying adequate attention to constructions of gender and sexuality. While the body of literature examining these themes is growing and becoming more nuanced, there is still a significant gap in our understanding of the relationship between gendered sexual identities and vulnerabilities to disease. In particular, few studies have explored how youths themselves perceive this relationship, and how these perceptions may differ among males and females. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differing 'gendered' perceptions of HIV risk among young women and men in a high-HIV-prevalence community in South Africa. Five focus groups were conducted with youths involved with a local school-based HIV-prevention programme in a resource-deprived, peri-urban community in KwaZulu-Natal Province. The data were recorded, transcribed, translated and thematically coded. We used a critical social science approach to inform our collaborative analysis. The findings reveal diverse understandings of the relationship between gender and HIV risk. The majority of the participants felt that females are more vulnerable to HIV as a result of gender inequalities; a minority felt that males are more vulnerable because of limited perceived control over their sex drive. Others felt that both sexes are equally vulnerable because 'the virus doesn't have a friend.' The theme of 'responsibility for spreading HIV emerged inductively from the data and also involved multiple understandings of gendered responsibility. Explicitly engaging with youths in targeted discussions on gendered HIV-related vulnerability and responsibility can offer an opportunity to challenge stereotypes and gender inequities, as well as inform interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".