RELIGION, GENDER, AND HIV: SEEKING SUPPORT AND CIRCUMVENTING STIGMA IN THE CHURCH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Older adults (>50 years) account for over half of Americans living with HIV. Within this population are a number of under researched, vulnerable groups, including aging women, who may have unique needs such as social support through organized religion. Focusing on pathways and barriers to social and spiritual support among older, heterosexual females with HIV, we conducted a collective case study of five females participating in the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) at the Atlanta site. Data collection included semi-structured, face-to-face interviews (median duration= 103 minutes) and social network mapping. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. We used VACS survey data and data from medical records to provide context for the qualitative data. Participants had a median age of 52 years (range 50-72) and were mostly black (80%) all were Christian, participated in regular religious services, and indicated religion was very important. Within case analysis revealed variation in social support reflective of differences in partner status and community ties. Cross-case analysis showed that each of the five women received substantial social support and an outlet to God through their religious congregations-giving meaning and purpose to their lives. However, all participants were concerned that disclosure of their HIV status would result in excommunication from their religious congregations. Participants circumvented these fears by discussing poor health in terms of their less socially stigmatized physical diagnoses, (e.g., polyneuropathy) or by limiting their interaction with church members when ill. These results highlight an ongoing need to address HIV stigma in religious congregations.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".