Success and Effective HIV

¶ … HIV Successful Women

The evaluation plan that will be deployed to measure the effectiveness and success of African-American women will revolve around a semi-structured interview with participants who meet certain demographic requirements. The focus of this plan is to determine how African-American women with this condition are able to meet the demands of living with HIV, as well as to identify what those particular demands are. This research study will combine elements of both qualitative and quantitative research, although it will emphasize the former with a semi-structured interview with which to elicit data from participants. During these interviews the researchers will have the opportunity to observe participants and gauge the impact of the sentiment of their words, which will constitute the crux of their data, accordingly.

The study will focus on the challenges and means to cope with HIV for African-American women aged 35-65 in an urban environment found on the west coast of the U.S. As such, it is necessary to find a minimum of 15 women who meet these demographic requirements. The researchers will limit the study to those who are able to speak English, HIV positive, and who were born in North America. Participants in a mentally debilitated state due to the indirect or direct repercussions of this virus will be excluded. The research method for this study is Heideggerian hermeneutical phenomenology, which "focuses on the understanding of what it is to be in the world and understanding a phenomenon...in the context of larger human existence" (p. 113). The phenomenon studied is HIV infection among the aforementioned population, and their various difficulties and mechanisms in coping with it.

Data collection will involve amassing more demographic data about the participants, which will effectively function as metadata. Specifically, the researchers will determine the age of participants, the number of children they have, their marital statuses, length of time in which they had HIV, level of education, and severity of infection as gauged by their viral loads and respective CD4 counts. However, the semi-structured interview will function as the primary means of collecting data and will contain a number of open-ended questions.

These questions will contain inquiries such as how did you initially find out you had HIV, what was your first reaction when you found out, what adjustments have you made to your life since then, and what is your view of living with this condition at this point. The interviewers will ask these questions and others as a means of probing the participants and determining what the most substantial obstacles are for living with this condition, and how these women are able to cope with it. Particular emphasis will be given to the effects of various family members on the lives of the participants, especially their children.