Background: This paper discusses the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention's effort to develop a web-based service called Project CREATE that responds to a need for targeted health promotion materials expressed by directors of HIV/STD prevention services in predominately rural states. Purpose: Project CREATE allows users to select customized…

A sample of 146 African American adolescents living in impoverished neighborhoods with high HIV rates participated in the Chicago HIV Prevention and Adolescent Mental Health Project (CHAMP), a longitudinal study of adolescent HIV risk exposure. The current study examined self-reported reasons why African American adolescents may participate in…

The "gold standard" for evaluating human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention programs is a partner-by-partner sexual behavior assessment that elicits information about each sex partner and the activities engaged in with that partner. When collection of detailed partner-by-partner data is not feasible, aggregate data (e.g., total…

Although the completion of the Human Genome Project will offer new insight into diseases and help develop efficient, personalized treatment or prevention programs, it will also raise new and non-trivial public health issues. Many of these issues fall under the professional purview of public health workers. As members of the public health…

Although a necessary component of good program management and accountability, monitoring data do not usually provide answers to questions about whether, how, and why a specific program works. More in-depth, systematic inquiry is needed to do this. In this article, the authors focus on the evaluation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-prevention…

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) to address research questions in 2 subfields of behavioral science: cancer prevention and control (e.g., determinants of cancer screening adherence) and behavioral oncology (e.g., determinants of psychosocial adjustment among cancer patients or…

Perspectives are provided to help evaluators of health promotion programs. Eight papers present critical issues in such evaluations, including: (1) conceptual themes of program theory and context; (2) topics related to measurement, data analysis, and research design; and (3) reports of evaluation studies. (SLD)

A socially valid behavior-change intervention is broadly defined to be directed to a problem of verifiable importance, be accepted and used appropriately by target groups, and reduce substantially the probability of the problem's occurrence in target populations. The definition is applied to a family-based program to prevent human immunodeficiency…