AIDS education and adolescents: Implications for service delivery personnel.

The purpose of this study was to determine if frequently used AIDS education programs in schools, such as popular half-hour video presentations, are effective in increasing the knowledge of adolescents to risk behaviors and transmission modes for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. Two distinctly different award winning films about AIDS were used to compare effects of treatment on students' knowledge and attitudes as measured by an anonymous written survey comparing adolescents with survey participants in a 1986 Boston metropolitan area study (Strunin, Hingson, 1987). Analysis of post-treatment survey data was conducted using the chi-square statistic for contingency tables comparing the two treatment groups with controls for each of the survey question's responses. More than half of the survey's knowledge questions were found statistically significant at the.05 level or better due to differences attributed to the films. An evaluation of the statistically significant knowledge questions by gender also indicated that differences existed for most questions by sex of respondents; most were statistically significant for one sex, but not both. A comparison of survey results with the original Strunin-Hingson study revealed significant changes in both attitude and knowledge levels for adolescents participating in this study. It was observed that levels of knowledge were generally higher in this study group, and there was a measurable increase in concern or worry over AIDS that was not evident in the 1986 data. A large percentage (46%) of this study's respondents indicated that they would abstain from sex as a behavior change to protect them from AIDS, compared with only 10% responding similarly in 1986. Only 25% of respondents indicated that they would use condoms, compared with 10% in 1986; and 9% would elect to be monogamous, compared with 3% previously. The findings of this study led to the conclusion that educational films may differ in their effect on imparting accurate AIDS knowledge to adolescents, and the messages about AIDS transmission (e.g. kissing, saliva) might be better understood by viewing films such as Suzi's Story in conjunction with didactic AIDS presentations