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Changing Drug Users’ Risk Environments: Peer Health Advocates as Multi-level Community Change Agents

  • Original Paper
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American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

Peer delivered, social oriented HIV prevention intervention designs are increasingly popular for addressing broader contexts of health risk beyond a focus on individual factors. Such interventions have the potential to affect multiple social levels of risk and change, including at the individual, network, and community levels, and reflect social ecological principles of interaction across social levels over time. The iterative and feedback dynamic generated by this multi-level effect increases the likelihood for sustained health improvement initiated by those trained to deliver the peer intervention. The Risk Avoidance Partnership (RAP), conducted with heroin and cocaine/crack users in Hartford, Connecticut, exemplified this intervention design and illustrated the multi-level effect on drug users’ risk and harm reduction at the individual level, the social network level, and the larger community level. Implications of the RAP program for designing effective prevention programs and for analyzing long-term change to reduce HIV transmission among high-risk groups are discussed from this ecological and multi-level intervention perspective.

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Notes

  1. The Study of High Risk Drug Use Settings for HIV Prevention, Project 3 of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) program project (P01 MH/DA56826) was conducted in Hartford from 1997–2000 with funds from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, grant #R01 DA13356. RAP is an affiliated study of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (P30 MH62294).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Community Research, 2 Hartford Square West, Suite 100, Hartford, CT, 06106, USA

    Margaret R. Weeks, Mark Convey, Jianghong Li, Kim Radda, Maria Martinez & Eduardo Robles

  2. Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd, Milwaukee, WI, 53226-0509, USA

    Julia Dickson-Gomez

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  1. Margaret R. Weeks
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  2. Mark Convey
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  3. Julia Dickson-Gomez
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Correspondence to Margaret R. Weeks.

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Weeks, M.R., Convey, M., Dickson-Gomez, J. et al. Changing Drug Users’ Risk Environments: Peer Health Advocates as Multi-level Community Change Agents. Am J Community Psychol 43, 330–344 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-009-9234-z

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