Finding Five: Focus On Education

Finding Five: Education Is Favored By All

Both the public and experts support education as the best way to address HIV/AIDS, though they frame it quite differently. In our groups, people talked primarily about broad-based awareness campaigns targeted to the general population, giving general information about the disease. Experts focused on targeting at-risk populations with particular information about being tested and treated.

By far, the most favored way to address the issue of HIV/AIDS in America for the public was more education, particularly in the form of public awareness announcements. In the words of a Des Moines woman, public service announcements would “go a long way” because “people pay attention, and when they are captivated by something, they are learning and taking it in.” A man in Los Angeles thought that if celebrities were open about their status, “the talk will start coming about more…and then you get more enlightened, and you want to know more.“

Older participants largely wanted these public service announcements to be directed to their own cohort, saying that the younger generation knows much about HIV/AIDS already, suggesting perhaps that they are interested in knowing more. One woman in Des Moines said that “[kids] talk about it in health class, so I think they’re probably more educated than we are, at least I am.”

Perhaps because they had had more education about HIV/AIDS in school, the New York young adult group was very skeptical that education would be particularly helpful to people who are naturally going to take risks or those under the influence of drugs and alcohol. One young man thought that “if you’re doing drugs and drinking on a regular basis, then your decision making is going to be reckless.”

They also knew of infected people who were not cautious about their own behaviors, putting others at risk. One man explained that his “[friend with HIV] doesn’t care who he sleeps with. Doesn’t care where he goes. Doesn’t use condoms still. He just doesn’t care. He’s like, ‘You know, I’m dying anyway. Take the rest of them with me. I don’t care.’ Then I have other friends who are like, ‘You know, I don’t want to spread this.’ They want to get educated more about it. Tell people. They go and do seminars and things like that. They’re actually trying to become more active with it, but it depends on the person.”

Experts also spoke of education, but, in the words of the president of an AIDS grant-making organization, it should be education that is “targeted and culturally relevant and appropriate” to different demographic groups. Some talked about how more research funding is needed to uncover ways to craft the most effective educational messages. A state legislator pointed out that “there is no single method for disseminating information, particularly in minority communities. You really need to understand the structure of those communities and how people communicate within them, and tailor your communication efforts to that structure.”

Unfortunately, some experts think that those within the AIDS community have not done a particularly good job at targeting education, or else they think that the education hasn’t resonated with those they need to reach. The director of a national public health organization said that “we have spent almost no money trying to understand how to educate people and change their behavior. The marketing people tell us, ’If you want to get people to buy stuff—look at the pharmaceutical industry, they have figured out how to drive demand for medications—even stuff that has side effects—they have figured out how to do that.’ We haven’t done it because we either haven’t figured it out or for other sociological reasons we’ve decided we don’t want to do it.”

Similarly, many experts talked about the need to not cast a wide net with funding HIV programs overall, but to make sure they are targeted to the demographic groups that need it the most. A civil rights attorney explained that “from a practical standpoint…targeting more vulnerable populations is likely to be a more productive use of resources.”

The president of an AIDS grant-making organization elaborated on this point, explaining, “[I]f you look at the epidemiology [of the disease], the fact of the matter is that most people simply are not at risk for HIV… In a world where we have limited resources and obvious data that show significant impact among MSM [men who have sex with men], African-Americans, Latinos, to not direct those resources to those most impacted populations or underserved areas is simply irresponsible.”

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