Public Health | ||||
Asking the Right Questions The SHAWL study attempts to draw parallels among the social factors that affect women's sexual health, including HIV risk. By Rebecca Rakoczy |
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Through the SHAWL study, Gina Wingood and a team of interviewers are surveying 1,500 women to understand how social issues may have a bearing on their sexual health. Her team includes Christina Camp, Eve Rose, Deja Hunger, Tamu Daniel, and Nikia Braxton. Ralph DiClemente frequently collaborates with Wingood. | ||||
Sometimes, it’s just about asking the right questions. For Gina Wingood, it’s about posing the most appropriate questions to 1,000 African American and 500 white women to assess how they confront specific issues in their lives that affect their sexual health, and ultimately, their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. |
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Gina Wingood believes the SHAWL study will lead to an intervention program to empower women to take charge of the social health issues in their lives. Her team is examining how gender and racial discrimination, economic hardship, and community and interpersonal violence may affect the decisions women make about their sexual behavior over time. | ||||
"We're looking at women's personal experience of violence, which we know is strongly associated with HIV risk. But in this survey, we're also asking women about violence in their communities to get at the impact of the broader environment." | ||||
- Gina Wingood |
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A national perspective While Wingood is a well-established voice in developing intervention programs for HIV prevention among African American women and teen girls, SHAWL is her first national survey. She often collaborates with Ralph DiClemente, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Public Health and co-director of the RSPH doctoral program in behavioral sciences and health education, in developing face-to-face intervention programs. Their successful interventions include SISTA (Sisters Informing Sisters about Topics on AIDS) and SihLE (Sistas Informing, Healing, Living and Empowering.) These programs aim to reduce sexual risk among African American females from ages 14 to 29. SHAWL is the first study Wingood has conducted that was not designed as an intervention. Compared with intervention programs, “Conducting a telephone survey is an easier way to get women to express themselves and what they’ve experienced,” she says. According to the theory of gender and power, three major social structures characterize the gender relationships between men and women: the sexual division of labor, the sexual division of power, and the structure of cathexis—the way women form emotional ties with others. Wingood has explored the relationship between women’s health and the gender and power theory before. More than seven years ago, she and DiClemente co-wrote an article for the quarterly Society for Public Health Education publication Health Education & Behavior. In that article, the authors used the theory of power and gender to examine the effectiveness of intervention programs aimed at reducing women’s HIV risk. Wingood is eager to see what the final results of SHAWL may show and where they may lead. “I’ve done a lot of studies for intervention programs, trying to reduce women’s risk of acquiring HIV. I know that information alone doesn’t really change things, but if we create programs with the support and knowledge of these studies, they are much more likely to do good by empowering women,” she says. “I have no doubt that SHAWL will lead to an intervention program. This project is motivating me to do more, to be more curious, and to do different things.” |
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