Examining HIV Risk Subgroups Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Guillermo J. Prado describes his research on the efficacy of an intervention for adolescents with certain risk factors.

In the study where I was looking at subgroups that was a NIDA-funded study to examine, we had an intervention study that compared the efficacy of three different types of intervention programs in preventing substance use and HIV risk among Hispanic youth.

And that subgroup analyses, there were two goals. One was to identify subgroup of Hispanic youth based on their type of risk, so based on their contextual risk factors like family functioning, parent-adolescent communication, family support and based on their intrapersonal risk, things like the adolescent's attitude towards using drugs, towards engaging in sex, their self-perception, their self-efficacy, et cetera. And then the second goal of that study was to examine whether the efficacy of these different intervention programs varied as a function of the risk subgroups that the adolescents were placed in.

Basically what we found was that for the first team that I described, just to identify the different types of subgroups, basically what we found was that in this sample there were four risk subgroups. And those subgroups were those kids who basically were high on the contextual risk factors and high on the intrapersonal risk, so those kids who had high risk across the board. Then those kids who had high contextual risk factors and low intrapersonal risk factors. And then those kids who had the low contextual risk factors and high intrapersonal risk. And the kids who had low risk across the board.

And what we found was that the kids who had the very poor contextual risk factors were the ones that reported to be using substances more, whereas those kids who had the highest intrapersonal risk factors were the ones that were reporting engaging in risky sexual behavior more. So it appeared, at least from this particular study, that the contextual risk factors were more related to substance use whereas the intrapersonal risk factors were more related to some of these risky sexual behaviors.

And in the second study that we're currently working on now, it seems that those kids who reported very poor family functioning prior to beginning the intervention, the intervention that specifically targeted those contextual factors did the best over time, which is consistent with what you would expect.