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Health Education Research, Vol. 14, No. 4, 473-484, August 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press

Adolescents' knowledge and attitudes concerning HIV infection and HIV-infected persons: how a survey and focus group discussions are suited for researching adolescents' HIV/AIDS knowledge and attitudes

Riikka Pötsönen and Osmo Kontula1

Department of Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, PO Box 35, 40351 Jyväskylä and
1 The Family Federation of Finland, The Population Research Institute, PO Box 849, 00101 Helsinki, Finland

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 distant the infected person was to the respondent. The FGDs presented a more sceptical view of the attitudes of adolescents than the survey, while the knowledge about HIV infection and AIDS was the same regardless of the research method. In the FGDs, girls discussed the topics more extensively than boys, they used longer sentences, there was spontaneous discussion within the groups and the participants commented on each other's opinions. Boys were often content with short dichotomous responses and the interviewers had to qualify the responses with supplementary questions.


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S. F. Dias, M. G. Matos, and A. C. Goncalves
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