Creating a New Paradigm for University/Community Partnerships for Social Work Research and Programming in HIV Prevention in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Both social work researchers and HIV/AIDS public health providers recognize the need for community-based HIV prevention strategies guided by research-based principles and processes. However, evidence-based interventions often need to be adapted to fit the demographics or particular characteristics of local communities. A paradigm in which programs are created based on evidence that is generated from partnerships between local university Schools of Social Work and HIV/AIDS service providers promises to benefit both research and practice. The authors present as a case study a research project to illustrate the benefits of meaningful collaboration between social work researchers and public health departments in an effort to strengthen the connection between the science and service.

ISSUES: Partnering of local university social work researchers and public health departments has many advantages, including sharing tangible and non-tangible resources, which are not inexhaustible. Service providers can be empowered by creating a better fit between the evidence and the needs of their local communities. Universities can benefit by giving social work faculty and their students opportunities to conduct meaningful research and to disseminate the findings within their local communities.

METHOD: A large university School of Social Work and a state Department of Health (DOH) collaborated to develop a research protocol leading to inform focused HIV education and prevention programs for older MSM (OMSM), an underserved and at-risk population. Previously, state DOH surveillance indicated a disproportionate increase in HIV cases among older MSM, but more data was needed to support focused program development for this age cohort. A social work faculty member with experience in HIV research, aging, and LGBT populations provided technical assistance, guidance, and expertise in choosing the most appropriate methods to collect data from a diverse population of OMSM. With input from community members and key informants, the researcher and staff collaborated to formulate research questions, identify key variables to investigate, generate hypotheses, and identify psychosocial measurement instruments and demographic items to incorporate in a 121-item written questionnaire. Service staff linked the researcher to community leaders and venues for data collection, and volunteer staff (all OMSM) assisted in data collection.

RESULTS: Building upon previous successful public relations and community marketing activities combined with evidence generated from a large community-based survey of 802 MSM aged 40 to 94 from various ethnic communities, the local DOH is now able to begin to introduce more focused HIV prevention strategies, in this case for OMSM communities in areas where HIV infection rates are disproportionately high.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Meaningful collaboration can help forge productive and partnerships between academic institutions (i.e., schools of Social Work) and local health departments to identify challenges faced in designing programs for underserved, difficult to access at-risk populations, such as sexual minorities and their subpopulations. Moreover, with limited resources and imminent threats to funding combined with increasing rates of HIV, it behooves researchers and community providers to create strategies that ensure the design, development, and implementation of highly-focused, evidence-based strategies which are so urgently needed.