The Solaar HIV Prevention Program for Gay and Bisexual Latino Men: Using Social Marketing to Build Capacity for Service Provision and Evaluation

Abstract

Community-researcher partnerships can be powerful mechanisms to understand and effectively address health and social problems such as HIV/AIDS prevention. When the partnership is a positive, productive one, the combined expertise and energy of both parties result in a more effective program and a better evaluation of its effects. This article describes one such partnership and how a program challenge provided the opportunity for both partners to develop new capacities and strengthen others. The program is Proyecto SOLAAR, a community-based and culturally-sensitive HIV prevention program for gay and bisexual Latino men. The program is an experiential, daylong retreat focused on personal aspects of the men (e.g., self-concept), ideas about and aspects of their relationship behavior (e.g., cultural misunderstandings, dating behavior), and HIV prevention; there is a follow-up reunion a month later to share experiences with other participants about new dating and HIV prevention behaviors. The article focuses in particular on how the partners built new capacity in the area of social marketing to address the challenge of participant recruitment and describes the components of the new campaign. These components included distinctive images in ads in publications read by the target population, a toll-free telephone number and Web site for easy initial contact with the program, phone cards and postcards featuring the specially created program image to reinforce a connection to the program, and other aspects. The article describes the partnership between the HIV service providers and the researchers and how the collaborative effort was key to understanding and addressing the recruitment problem, identifying potential solutions, and implementing the new social marketing strategy. This process resulted in four kinds of capacities that were built or strengthened, including program recruitment, program content and implementation, program evaluation, and the partnership itself. The article concludes with a discussion of the unexpected benefits of the capacity-building experience and of the antecedent conditions that fostered the positive partnership outcomes.

HIV among immigrants living in high-income countries: a realist review of evidence to guide targeted approaches to behavioural HIV prevention

“…This mechanism was found to be operationalised primarily through drawing on research or consultations to elicit dominant cultural values, which were then incorporated into the intervention content [51,54,94-112]. In some interventions, such as those carried out with gay men, the dominant immigrant community values on homosexuality were juxtaposed with the dominant cultural values in the mainstream gay community in the destination country, leading to interventions for Latino and Asian gay and bisexual men that addressed positive ethnic and sexual identities [94,95,97,113]. Sound or moderate evidence to support this mechanism was reported in 37 views studies indicating that ‘ consonance ’ mechanisms were also seen as critical by immigrants themselves.…”

“…There was positive feedback of ‘ understanding ’ mechanisms reported in two studies of a single intervention with Latina immigrant women in the USA [99,100] and in an intervention with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in The Netherlands [158]. There were reports of general satisfaction or improved recruitment to, or demand for, intervention activities among programme participants in five studies that employed this adaptive mechanism [51,54,95,110,124], though this could not be attributed specifically to the use of the first language of immigrants. The evidence to support this mechanism in views studies indicated that what immigrants themselves most value is ‘closeness’ in terms of ‘shared language’ [115,120,121,125-127,129-133,140,144,147,150,165,166].…”

“…This mechanism was found to be operationalised primarily through segmentation of populations using ethnicity indicators, such as country of birth or language spoken, to target the intervention [98,102,105,109,123,124,158,162,168]. Another commonly used, though less specific, strategy was to target broader categories of immigrants such as Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders or Africans, and within these broader categories it was commonly reported that there was a dominant ethnicity, such as Mexican, Filipino or Ugandan, reached by the intervention [54,94,95,97,99-101,103,105-111,113,122,163,167]. Some interventions that reported only partial evidence of this mechanism could be inferred to have made a choice to target multiple ethnicities at the expense of ‘ specificity ’, as theorised in this review [96,104,105,113,164,167].…”

Community Perspectives on Factors That Influence Collaboration in Public Health Research

“…This is related to informants’ concerns about improving the knowledge base of CBO staff, the services they provide, and the CBO infrastructure. It appears that meaningful collaboration asks researchers to devote more time to staff training and CBO capacity building (Clark & McLeroy, 1995; Conner, Takahashi, Ortiz, Archuleta, Muniz, & Rodriguez, 2005). If a balance is not achieved among CBO time, human resources, and the researcher’s direct involvement with a research project, it may indeed discourage CBOs from collaborating in HIV-prevention research.…”

Developing and implementing culturally competent evaluation: A discussion of multicultural validity in two HIV prevention programs for Latinos

“…Internal validity focused on whether a difference occurred that was caused by a special treatment or program; external validity was concerned with the generalizability of the effect to other groups, over different times and settings. Cook and Campbell (1979) expanded this validity formulation, and recently Shadish, Cook, and Campbell (2002) refined it further. Shadish, Cook, and Campbell specify four types of validity: internal, external, construct, and statistical conclusion.…”