Abstract
HIV/AIDS is a public health problem that is transmitted through risky sexual behavior. The literature suggests that the perception of HIV risk is a motivator for the prevention of risky sexual behaviors. There is no culturally adapted scale to assess HIV risk perception in the Hispanic-American population. The aim of this research was to develop a scale to assess HIV risk perception in Hispanic-American young adults. A cross-sectional instrumental design was used, with a sample of students from the Chilean city with the highest HIV rates. Participants (n = 524) were between 18 and 33 years old, of whom 51% were women, 84.4% said they were heterosexual and 43.7% said they had not been tested for HIV/AIDS. The final scale has 9 items and 2 dimensions: (1) perceived risk susceptibility and (2) perceived risk severity. The results showed that the identified structure provided adequate levels of reliability (ω > .8) and presented evidence of validity, based on the internal structure of the test (i.e., using ESEM) and on the relationship with other variables (i.e., the sexual risk behaviors scale). In addition, the results showed strong invariance between the scores for men and women. It is concluded that the HIV risk perception scale has adequate psychometric properties to assess HIV risk perception in equivalent samples.
Highlights
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is a pandemic that affects thousands of people socially, physically and psychologically [1], which influences quality of life and well-being, increases the development of depression and anxiety [2,3,4]. These adverse effects acquire greater relevance when considering that 37.9 million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS, and in Latin America, 100,000 new cases were registered in 2018, with an estimated 1.9 million people currently living with HIV/AIDS on this continent
The proposed scale covers most of the dimensions available in the scales designed to assess HIV risk perception based on two dimensions, since, in our review, we found that: 1) all the scales include a dimension that measures the perceived probability of acquiring HIV, understood as a belief in the subjective possibility of experiencing an inherent threat to HIV risk, and 2) most scales and theoretical models include an assessment of future consequences; we decided to incorporate a dimension called perceived severity of HIV, defined as the severity of the impact that people imagine living with HIV would have on their lives
The purpose of this study was to develop a scale to assess HIV risk perception for use in Hispanic-American young adults according to current psychometric standards
Summary
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is a pandemic that affects thousands of people socially, physically and psychologically [1], which influences quality of life and well-being, increases the development of depression and anxiety [2,3,4]. These adverse effects acquire greater relevance when considering that 37.9 million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS, and in Latin America, 100,000 new cases were registered in 2018, with an estimated 1.9 million people currently living with HIV/AIDS on this continent.
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