Los Angeles, California

Community Profile: Los Angeles, California

Community Characteristics

Los Angeles was the only group where HIV/AIDS came up as the most important health problem facing the country today, and more people in the Los Angeles group knew someone with HIV/AIDS than any other group.

Despite their apparent awareness about HIV/AIDS, many participants displayed some glaring misconceptions about HIV: Nearly half the group thought there was at least some possibility that one could get HIV through sweat, over half reported that one could get HIV from kissing and, not surprisingly, most of the group thought that scientists are still learning how HIV is transmitted. “People don’t really know how you get AIDS,” said one man. “They thought it was this and that. There are a whole lot of rumors, and scientists are still studying and finding out every day.”

Participants in Los Angeles were more inclined to say that people get HIV because of factors outside of one’s control. They were more likely than those in the other groups to talk about socioeconomic factors and fear of testing. One participant pointed out that “we got a lot of people under economic pressure, which basically has a trickle-down effect on people. Some people will get a little wilder than others because of it - ...If you go into a more well-off economically suburb or white neighborhood as opposed to there, there’s going to be a difference."

Another woman said that more people would be inclined to get tested if there were more support for people with the disease: “I think that if people feel that they can be taken care of, they would go and get tested—because there wouldn’t be so much fear, like, ’What would I do if I do have it?’ If you have support groups, then those people don’t feel isolated. I think it would really, really help.”

Participants were very supportive of proposals to provide medication and mental health services for those with HIV, and some participants actually went out of their way to criticize the government’s handling of the AIDS epidemic.

One man said we don’t have more HIV testing going on because “the government don’t want to pay nothing out of their pockets,” and another woman agreed, saying, “[T]hat’s why there hasn’t been any education for the last eight years.” And later in the group, one woman said that HIV won’t get more funding because “the old boys’ group in Washington are sitting there making the decisions for the population. These are guys that can get heart attacks, so let’s see, is the money going to go to heart disease or is it going to AIDS?… They’re prejudice[d].”

Conversely, there was one participant who was very much against government intervention because he’s “opposed to the idea that we can turn to the government for all the medical things.” Political statements like these rarely surfaced in other groups.

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