Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS

by Samuel R. Friedman, Richard Curtis, Alan Neaigus, Benny Jose, Don C. Des Jarlais

Overview

Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS recognizes HIV as a socially structured disease - its transmission usually requires intimate contact between individuals - and shows how social networks shape high-risk behaviors and the spread of HIV.
The authors recount the groundbreaking use of social network methods, ethnographic direct-observation techniques, and in-depth interviews in their study of a drug-using community in Brooklyn, New York. They provide a detailed documentary of the lives of community members. They describe drug-use, the affects of poverty and homelessness, the acquisition of money and drugs, and social relationships within the group.
Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS shows that social networks and contexts are of crucial importance in understanding and fighting the AIDS epidemic. These findings should revitalize prevention efforts and reshape social policy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441933133
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	12/06/2010
Series:	Aids Prevention and Mental Health , #76
Edition description:	2002
Pages:	277
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

Learning from Lives.- The Drug Scene and Risk Behaviors in Bushwick.- The Very First Hit.- Network Concepts and Serosurvey Methods.- The Research Participants and Their Behaviors.- Personal Risk Networks and High-Risk Injecting Settings of Drug Injectors.- Syringe Sharing and the Social Characteristics of Drug-Injecting Dyads.- Sexual Networks, Condom Use, and the Prospects for HIV Spread to Non-Injection Drug Users.- Sociometric Networks among Bushwick Drug Injectors.- Networks and HIV and Other Infections.- Prevention and Research.

Editorial Reviews

Part of an extensive, nine title series on AIDS Prevention and Mental Health, this book presents research findings on the influence of social context and social networks on HIV infections among IV drug users. Unlike most presentations of important research projects, this volume tells the story of the research project and its research subjects in the Bushwick neighborhood of New York City. This approach provides a much richer understanding of the research questions, and allows for the findings to be appreciated in very human terms. The primary audience includes a wide variety of researchers interested in IV drug use and HIV transmission at the community level. Health workers and program staff for prevention and control efforts targeting IV drug use and HIV will also find this volume of interest, as will students in all of these fields. More than anything else, this book tells a story. This is done in a thoroughly interesting and cohesive style. The community setting is closely examined and research findings are presented through the life stories of research subjects. Findings focus on first IV drug use experiences, risk networks, social context, sexual networks, and sociometric networks. This approach differs both in style and in content from the other volumes published in this series. This is a very strong work and perhaps the most interesting and informative in this series. In examining the social context and networks of IV drug users, this book provides new insights into behavior and risk patterns. In so doing, it opens new doors for prevention and control interventions. The personal stories that underlie the research questions and findings make this one of the most movingpresentations of research findings in the field.

Bernard J. Turnock

Recognizing HIV as a socially structured disease because its transmission usually requires intimate contact between individuals, investigators from the National Development and Research Institutes in New York City report their findings on using social network methods, ethnographic direct-observation techniques, and in-depth interviews to study the drug-using community in Brooklyn. They describe the lives of community members, drug use, the effects of poverty and homelessness, the acquisition of money and drugs, and social relationships within the group. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

‘This is an interesting, important, and well-written book. It contains a great deal of useful new information about the risk behaviours of drug injectors and how they respond or fail to respond to those risks... The book provides detail about how individual drug injectors understand and try cope with these immediate risks. It stands as a considerable achievement and one from which all who work in this field can learn.'

Addiction, 95:8 (2000)

"This book represents the culmination of a decade's work by consummate researcher-advocates who are not content to disseminate their findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals but who wish to build on research findings to improve the lives of the people they have studied. Pragmatism and the desire to produce change permeate all 13 chapters of this book."

(Karen McKinnon, Psychiatric Services, April 2001)

From the Publisher