Inner-city African American Women Research Articles

Drug use among inner-city African American women: the process of managing loss.

The grounded theory study described in this article investigated illicit drug use in the lives of 32 drug-using women living in two inner-city neighborhoods of a large metropolitan U.S. city. The underlying purpose was to describe the process of how life situations and events influenced the onset of drug use and changes in drug-using behaviors. Analysis of in-depth interviews revealed several themes. The basic social process, managing loss, was identified. Painful feelings of loss resulted from the separation of someone or something from the lives of participants and included death or desertion of a significant other, loss of child custody, and rejection by a significant other. Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse resulted in a loss of ability to give and receive love and trust in oneself or others. Losses resulted in an escalation of drug use. Findings have implications for interventions to assist women in dealing with drug use, violence in their lives, self-care, and parenting.

Women who are HIV infected: The role of religious activity in psychosocial adjustment

The role of religious activity in the psychosocial adjustment of 205 inner-city African American women, one-half of whom are HIV infected, was examined. Those who were HIV infected reported praying more but viewed prayer as less effective in coping with a chronic illness. Frequency of prayer predicted optimism about the future, whereas religious activity was not related to current depressive symptoms.

Children whose mothers are HIV infected: Who resides in the home and is there a relationship to child psychosocial adjustment?

This study examined who resides in the home when a mother is HIV infected and whether this relates to child psychosocial adjustment. Participants were 249 inner-city African American women, 40% of whom were HIV infected, and their 6- to 11-year-old children. HIV-infected women in the symptomatic-AIDS stage were more likely than noninfected mothers to have more adults, particularly a grand-mother or aunt of the child and more adults per child residing in the home. Only the ratio of adults-to-children in the home was related to child adjustment, and this occurred primarily when mothers were in the symptomatic-AIDS stage of infection.

Life Adjustment of an At-Risk Population: A Ten-Year Follow-Up Of Urban African-American Teens

Variables influencing life adjustment for a group of inner- city African-American women were examined. Seventy subjects were drawn from 393 participants in a 2-year study of teenage pregnancy conducted in the early 1980's at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. A modified longitudinal design was used to explore the long-term consequences of minority status and urban poverty. Standardized measures and a semi-structured interview were used to assess the criterion variable of life adjustment. Adolescent childbearing history, social class index, educational attainment. and household structure (e.g., single parent, female-headed), as well as number of life event stressors in adulthood, were examined in relationship to quality of adult adjustment. Protective mechanisms hypothesized to mediate the effects of these risk factors were dispositional traits - personality and self esteem measured in adolescence and adult temperament - and dependable sources of social sup- port. The principal findings were that the distress component of temperament explained the largest proportion of variability in adjustment score, followed by the number of social supports, and the number of life event stressors. The sociability aspect of temperament came close to achieving significance at the .OS level. This study extends the resiliency literature to a sample of inner-city African-American women, augmenting this emerging area of research and confirming the utility of Garmenzy's (1991) triad of protective factors as a means of conceptualizing buffers against life stress.

Attitudes toward HIV testing among impoverished inner-city African-American women.

During a study of the perceived benefits of unsafe (condomless) sex, some women's erroneous convictions that they have been tested for HIV seropositivity and most women's reluctance to identify their own sexual behaviors at high-risk when explaining why they had been tested were noted. Many participants assumed that clinicians drawing their blood would check it for HIV when they checked for other matter, and most of those reporting that they have had or would have HIV tests saw the test as part of a routine health check. Factors underlying the women's optimistically biased denial of their own HIV/AIDS risks and their related refiguring of the purposes and conditions of HIV testing are discussed, and the ways in which the women's attitudes critique current policies are described. Because of the culturally promoted strength and importance of women's denial, testing programs that seek to capitalize on an evoked sense of risk cannot succeed; such programs threaten women's faith in their relationships and question women's social and moral standings in a humiliating fashion. Those who promote testing would do better to present HIV screening as routine, because this is how women who accept testing generally portray it. Importantly, clinicians must explain that the test is not automatically administered. Cast as a standard health-related procedure for which permission must be granted, HIV testing will seem more rational, pro-active, and acceptable to the women targeted for testing.

HIV-1 seroprevalence and risk behaviors in an urban African-American community cohort.

Previous attempts at obtaining population estimates of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) seroprevalence have been beset by problems of cooperation bias. As part of the fourth round of study with an urban African-American community cohort, the following investigation was aimed at assessing HIV-1 prevalence and the relative importance of sex and drug injection as risk factors in infection. Personal interviews were conducted in the home with 364 respondents, followed by voluntary blood sample collection from 287 of these individuals. Blood assays showed a point prevalence of 8.4% HIV-1 seropositivity in this community cross section, with a higher female-to-male ratio than appears among acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) case reports. Most infected persons were unaware and unsuspecting of their infection. First, findings underscore the need to focus on risk behaviors rather than on risk groups. Second, the smaller than 2:1 ratio of infected men to women suggests that current AIDS case reports seriously underestimate HIV-1 infection among certain cohorts of African-American women. Finally, widespread ignorance of own infected status and inaccurate risk assessment signal the substantial task for community health educators in reaching inner-city African-American men and women at risk.