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Proportion of US Congregations that have People Living with HIV

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Abstract

Surveillance studies monitor the prevalence and incidence of HIV, and this information is used by policy makers to design prevention programs and facilitate care for people living with HIV (PLWHIV). Although most of these studies monitor the presence of PLWHIV in the general population or specific communities, some assess the presence of PLWHIV in organizations. One type of organization that has not been examined, yet could potentially play a large role in caring for PLWHIV, is the religious congregation. In this study, we estimate the proportion of US religious congregations that have PLWHIV and examine whether congregations that are in contact with populations with high HIV prevalence and incidence rates are more likely to have PLWHIV using data from a nationally representative sample of congregations and the 2000 Census. Over 10,000 congregations have PLWHIV, and congregations containing, open to, or located in areas with populations with high HIV prevalence and incidence rates are more likely to have them. This study offers new insight into the presence of HIV in the United States and provides information about which congregations may be amenable to serving as sites of HIV programs.

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Notes

  1. This strategy exploits the insight that the organizational affiliations of a representative sample of people constitute a representative sample of organizations (McPherson 1982). Thus, one can develop a nationally representative sample of US congregations from a nationally representative sample of Americans.

  2. Key informant reports are widely used in organizational research as a way to obtain accurate information about the features of organizations (cf. Frenk et al. forthcoming; Marsden and Rohrer 2001; McPherson and Rotolo 1995).

  3. The question is, “Is there anyone in your congregation who has publicly acknowledged his or her infection with the virus that causes AIDS? That is, is there anyone who is openly HIV-positive?”

  4. Chaves and Anderson (2009) provide an example to help explain this issue, “Suppose that the universe contains only two congregations, one with 1,000 regular attenders and the other with 100 regular attenders. Suppose further that the 1,000-person congregation supports a food pantry and the 100-person congregation does not. We can express this reality in one of two ways. We can say that 91 percent of the people are in a congregation that supports a food pantry (1,000/1,100), or we can say that 50 percent of the congregations support a food pantry (1/2). Both of these are meaningful numbers. Ignoring the over-representation of larger congregations, a percentage or mean from the NCS is analogous to the 91 percent in this example. Weighted inversely proportional to congregational size, a percentage or mean is analogous to the 50 percent in this example. The first number views congregations from the perspective of the average attender, which gives greater weight to congregations with more people in them; the second number views them from the perspective of the average congregation, ignoring size differences.”

  5. Because we collected congregations’ addresses, we were able to attach data from the 2000 Census Summary File 3 to the NCS data file. Based on previous research examining the level of measurement to use when assessing health variables, we attach block group level data (Krieger et al. 2002).

  6. Because of the small proportion of congregations that have PLWHIV, we run a sensitivity analysis using the RELOGIT program in STATA to assess the robustness of the coefficients produced in the regression model (King and Zeng 1999a; King and Zeng 1999b; Tomz et al. 1999). The model produced by RELOGIT does not vary significantly from the model that appears in the paper.

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Acknowledgement

The project was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (#0452269) as well as grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. (2006-1675-000), the Kellogg Foundation (P0118042), and the Louisville Institute (2005105). These grants supported the collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data. Data collection was handled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and the data were cleaned at Duke University, Durham, NC. The authors would like to thank Kim Blankenship, Brad Fulton, and Steven Foy for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Duke University, Box 90088, Durham, NC, 27707-0088, USA

    Steven M. Frenk

  2. Departments of Sociology and Religion, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Mark Chaves

  3. Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Mark Chaves

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  1. Steven M. Frenk
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  2. Mark Chaves
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Correspondence to Steven M. Frenk.

Additional information

Data for this paper are drawn from the second wave of the National Congregations Study.

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Frenk, S.M., Chaves, M. Proportion of US Congregations that have People Living with HIV. J Relig Health 51, 371–380 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-010-9379-y

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