Love, Sex, and Power Posted on January 20, 2009 Hortensia Amaro (bio) explains how viewing the context of HIV infection in women led to a early publication success.

And then something really unexpected happened: The AIDS epidemic came along.

And I saw more and more women who were part of our study sample being impacted by this and being diagnosed with AIDS. And they were pregnant and wondering whether their babies were infected or going to be infected, and realizing that there wasn't much out there in terms of interventions and prevention to help women know how to protect themselves.

People, when I started doing work on HIV prevention with women, had been very much using a cognitive model of behavior change. So looking very much at the individual characteristics of women, and I started saying, "Well, but let's look at the context, the relational context of HIV risk like abusive relationships and the power of women to negotiate sex and," et cetera.

And actually that really was informed by the work we were doing at the ground level with women in the community where it was very evident that their risk of infection was very much shaped by the relationship and the lack of power in relationships. So I ended up actually writing a conceptual piece that became very important, a paper in the American Psychologist called "Love, Sex, and Power" on HIV prevention.

And I think that that paper probably reflected areas in which the field really was ready to go into because a lot of graduate students and other researchers picked it up and kind of took off and did a lot more work on the role of power in relationship and women's HIV risk.

So I came to urban health a little bit late in my career, but of course it's partly because that's how it developed in public health, but it felt like it very much resonates with my perspective of looking at context.