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Okoye, Helen Uche

Risky sexual behaviours and misconceptions about HIV persist among young people in Sub-Saharan Africa, but many studies create a composite scale and conceptualize the commonly used comprehensive HIV knowledge items as a unidimensional measure. I performed exploratory factor analyses to examine the factor structure of the HIV knowledge measures in the Demographic and Health Surveys. Based on a cutoff point of 0.40, across the countries, knowledge about behavioural measures to prevent HIV loaded highly on one factor ( 0.36 to 0.87), but had lower loadings on a second factor ( 0.01 to 0.27). In contrast, misconceptions about the disease loaded highly on the second factor (0.40 to 0.99) and had lower loadings on the first factor (0.04 to 0.21). These findings underscore the need to classify the items for HIV-related knowledge research based on their psychometric properties to guide HIV education and prevention efforts.

Graduating Project

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0438906

Applied Science, Faculty of; Nursing, School of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/