Sophia Forum is helping with recruitment for a number of research studies – please see the listings below:
Exploring perceptions and sense making of HIV risks among women with an HIV diagnosis
My name is Rachael Scott and I am a Student Researcher in the Department of Health and Social Care at the University of Essex. I would like to invite you to take part in a research study.
When looking at HIV in 2023 women are still regarded as an overlooked demographic group in the conversations about HIV in the UK although women account for a high percentage of new diagnoses every year.
Recent HIV data shared by Public Health England (2021) indicated that women are one of the largest demographic groups to be diagnosed with an HIV diagnosis and as a population group are not sharing the same declining rates as seen in the men who have sex with men demographic profile.
Discussions by UK charities and health bodies have discussed several of the contributing factors to why this maybe and the reoccurring thoughts are that we still do not know enough about how women acquire HIV and what may put them at risk of HIV to successfully target women at risk of HIV with education and prevention.
In this research study, I wish to explore how women think about their risk of acquiring HIV, hoping that a greater understanding of how women think about and engage with the topic of risk in relation to HIV may generate useful new knowledge to support health promotion messaging and interventions to reduce new HIV diagnosis in women within the UK.
In order to explore the topic of risk and HIV with women, I will be looking to capture individual accounts of lived experience from women with HIV in the UK, exploring how they perceived the risk of HIV prior to diagnosis and the factors that led to them acquiring HIV and how their thoughts, attitudes and behaviours may have changed over time.
If you are a woman with HIV:
- who have been diagnosed with HIV for at least twelve months,
- currently living in the UK,
- over the age of 18 years
- was living in the UK at the time of your HIV diagnosis.
Then please do get in contact to take part in this research (email rs19367@essex.ac.uk).
If you take part in this study, you will be invited to attend an interview with the researcher at a mutually convenient time in a neutral and private location in person or via a meeting online,
- During this interview (that will be semi-structured and ideally flow like more of a conversation between two people than a formal interview), you will be asked to share your thoughts, views and opinions in relation to the topic of HIV and risk; this interview will be recorded on an audio recording device and later transcribed by the researcher and anonymised so that you are unidentifiable.
- The interview is expected to last between 45 and 60 minutes and should only need to happen once.
