A105. Rice, R. E., Wu, Z.,
Li, L., Detels, R., & Rotheram-Borus, M. J. (2012). Reducing
STD/HIV
stigmatizing attitudes through community popular opinion leaders in
Chinese
markets. Human
Communication Research, 38, 379-405.
Reducing STDs and
HIV/AIDS incidence requires campaigns
designed to change knowledge, attitudes and practices of risky sexual
behavior
and its consequences. In China, a
significant obstacle to such changes is the stigma associated with
these
diseases. Thus one campaign intervention strategy is to train credible
community popular opinion leaders to discuss these issues in everyday
social
venues. This study tested the effectiveness of such an approach on
reducing
HIV/AIDS stigma, across two years, from a sample of over 4500 market
vendors,
in three conditions. Results showed an
increasing growth in market communication about intervention messages,
and
concomitant declines in stigmatizing attitudes, across time, with the
greatest
changes in community popular opinion leaders, significant changes in
intervention non-opinion leaders, and little change in the control
markets.
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