Adolescent belief systems and HIV risk behaviors among college students: Examining the relative contributions of future-related thinking and risk context

For some young people HIV is the first life-threatening risk that needs consideration: for others it is not. This study examined safer sex practices among college students against the backdrop of both the dangerousness of their home neighborhoods and their future expectancies together as a context within which HIV risk is perceived and acted upon. HIV knowledge, perceptions of risk for HIV, recent high-risk sexual behavior, intentions to practice safe sex, future orientation, and dispositional optimism were assessed. Students at a Catholic university in New York City participated as subjects. Results indicate that perceptions of risk were associated with intentions both directly and in combination with environmental peril. Environmental peril also interacted with dispositional optimism to influence intentions. Given the relative homogeneity of this college sample, these results speak to the value of assessing high-risk life experience (environmental peril) as an important and unique contributor to differences in sexual risk taking. Limitations of the current study as well as directions for research are discussed.* ftn*Originally published in DAI Vol. 57, No. 12. Reprinted here with corrected title