Adolescents' knowledge and attitudes concerning HIV infection and HIV-infected persons: how a survey and focus group discussions are suited for resea…

1999

The purpose of this article is to examine how two different corpora of material are suited for researching the sexuality of youth on the basis of material gathered via a structured questionnaire (N = 1183 response rate 87%) and via eight focus group discussions (FGDs) and to investigate the knowledge and opinions of adolescents at the age of 15 years about HIV infection and HIV-infected persons. Both boys and girls showed a good level of knowledge about HIV infection and AIDS. While their level of knowledge was good their attitude was that the threat of an HIV infection was not a personal issue. Furthermore negative attitudes to those having HIV/AIDS became more pronounced the more socially…