"It is not a sin going for the test": A qualitative study of attitudes towards HIV testing in Pentecostal churches in Mombasa, Kenya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In sub-Saharan Africa, religious leaders are highly revered. They are in a position to play an important role in response to the HIV epidemic. This study explored the attitudes of religious leaders towards HIV testing in Pentecostal churches in Mombasa, Kenya. Individual in-depth interviews with seven Pentecostal religious leaders and four focus group discussions (FGDs) with congregation members were conducted. The in-depth interviews highlighted the range of views of the religious leaders towards HIV testing, while the FGDs illustrated the religious community norms that shape the congregations attitudes towards testing. Religious leaders were important in influencing the congregants' decisions about whether or not to seek HIV testing. Some religious leaders address HIV in their interactions with congregants and actively promote testing. However, many religious leaders do not talk about testing because of the stigma associated with HIV as a sexually transmitted disease. Religious leaders cited numerous barriers to advocacy for HIV testing in the church. These included conformity to religious norms on faith and righteousness, belief in faith healing of HIV, and a perception of the disease as God's punishment. A notable exception to the religious leaders' resistance to discussing HIV was the widespread acceptance of HIV testing prior to marriage. Focus group discussions highlighted the role of religious leaders in motivating congregants' decisions to seek HIV testing. Many FGD participants expressed desire for their religious leaders to advocate for HIV testing. These results highlight the importance of religious leaders in influencing HIV testing decisions among religious adherents. If barriers to discussion of HIV testing in Pentecostal communities could be addressed, religious leaders could play a key role in motivating church members to seek HIV testing.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".