Sources of social support and sexual behaviour advice for young adults in rural South Africa

Abstract

IntroductionWhile young people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are at greatest risk of HIV acquisition, uptake of HIV prevention interventions among them has been limited. Interventions delivered through social connections have changed behaviour in many settings, but not to date in SSA. There is little systematic evidence on whom young SSA adults turn to for advice. We therefore conducted an exploratory cross-sectional study from whom young rural South Africans received support and sexual behaviour-specific advice.MethodsWe asked 119 18–34 year olds in rural KwaZulu-Natal about the important people in their lives who provided emotional, informational, financial, physical, social or other support. We also asked whether they had discussed sex or HIV prevention with each contact named. We used descriptive statistics and logistic regression to analyse support and advice provision patterns.ResultsRespondents named 394 important contacts, each providing a mean of 1.7 types of support. Most contacts were relatives, same-gender friends or romantic partners. Relatives provided most informational, financial and physical support; friends and partners more social support and sexual advice. Respondents reported discussing sexual matters with 60% of contacts. Sources of support changed with age, from friends and parents, towards siblings and partners.DiscussionSexual health interventions for young adults in rural South Africa may be able to harness friend and same-generation kin social ties through which sex is already discussed, and parental ties through which other forms of support are transmitted. The gender-segregated nature of social connections may require separate interventions for men and women.

Sexual Attitudes, Beliefs, Practices, and HIV Risk During Pregnancy and Post-delivery: A Qualitative Study in Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe

“…However, there are others, most notably a woman's partner, whose perspectives are influential on matters related to sex and relationships. The extent to which women follow advice from various key influencers in their lives should be further investigated, and in cases where there are contradictory beliefs, questions remain about how women navigate making decisions related to sex [22].…”

Thetha Nami : Participatory development of a peer-navigator intervention to deliver biosocial HIV prevention for adolescents and youth in rural South Africa

“…The evaluation data arose from: (i) surveys with a representative sample of 13-35-year-old-males and females (n=4918); (ii) rapid ethnographic community mapping (n=4); (iii) provider and user interviews (n=22 and n=58 respectively); and (iv) group discussions (n=29). Detailed methods and ndings of the contextual factors that drive risk and create barriers to effective HIV testing, care and prevention have been previously reported [1,6,40,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. For the purposes of the intervention development the ndings were summarised and converted into vignettes, case-studies and simple infographics by a team of social scientists, statisticians and clinicians who had been engaged in the data collection and peer-navigator training (supplementary le 2).…”

Thetha Nami: participatory development of a peer-navigator intervention to deliver biosocial HIV prevention for adolescents and youth in rural South Africa

“…The evaluation data arose from: (i) surveys with a representative sample of 13-35-year-old-males and females (n = 4918); (ii) rapid ethnographic community mapping (n = 4); (iii) provider and user interviews (n = 22 and n = 58 respectively); and (iv) group discussions (n = 29). Detailed methods and findings of the contextual factors that drive risk and create barriers to effective HIV testing, care and prevention have been previously reported [1,6,40,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. For the purposes of the intervention development the findings were summarised and converted into vignettes, case-studies and simple infographics by a team of social scientists, statisticians and clinicians who had been engaged in the data collection and peer-navigator training (supplementary file 2).…”

“…Drivers of risk and barriers to effective uptake of multi-level HIV prevention for adolescents and young adults in rural KZN drawn from survey data (n = 4918) and studies conducted 2016-2018[1,6,8,37,40,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][51][52][53][54][55][56] …”