“Bringing back hope”: how faith-based responses to HIV and AIDS differ from secular responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates an assertion by faith-based organisations (FBO) that spirituality is the defining feature of their HIV and AIDS interventions. It is based on interviews with 24 people working on the issue of HIV and AIDS in churches or church organisations in Johannesburg, Rustenburg, Pretoria, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Cape Town. The article critically assesses the perceived difference between faith-based responses to HIV and AIDS and secular responses, including government programmes, in relation to the research literature on spirituality. After introducing the article, the argument begins with an exploration of the literature on churches and HIV and AIDS, outlining a gap which the article seeks to fill. The article then discusses the methods used for interviewing and analysing interview material. This is followed by religious leaders' own comments on how faith-based responses to HIV and AIDS differ from secular responses. The article concludes with a discussion which brings the literature to bear on the interview excerpts and then outlines the implications of decreased international funding for the HIV and AIDS programmes operated by the Anglican and Catholic churches, for example, a likely reduction in the accompaniment and monitoring of those who are HIV-positive.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| 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".