Introduction. Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) continue to be highly prevalent among young women, and STIs continue to be a challenging health issue on college campuses. Studies have shown that the highest prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV) is among young adult women, ages 20 to 24, including female college students. While the HPV vaccine has proven to be highly effective in preventing certain high-risk types of HPV, it is not effective in preventing all types of HPV or other STIs. Practicing other safer sex behaviors, in addition to condom use, also can help individuals protect themselves and their partners from acquiring HPV and other STIs. Purpose. Relationships between knowledge about HPV and the HPV vaccine, beliefs about HPV, acceptance of the HPV vaccine, and intentions to practice safer sex behaviors were assessed to determine if female college students who had a high acceptance of the HPV vaccine were also more likely to practice safer sex behaviors. Methods. A convenience sample of 2,706 undergraduate female college students, ages 18 to 24, from three U.S. public universities, completed an online survey that measured the following study variables: knowledge about HPV; knowledge about the HPV vaccine; acceptance of the HPV vaccine, specifically influential factors and barriers to vaccination; as well as attitudes, normative beliefs, control beliefs and intentions for practicing safer sex behaviors. Results. The majority of participants had a high level of knowledge of HPV (70.4%) and the HPV vaccine (73.7%). Over one-third of the participants (37.3%) received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine. Most participants thought they had a low susceptibility to HPV, as 54% thought they were unlikely to contract HPV; however, most (53.6%) thought that HPV would be a serious problem for them. The safer sex behavior that participants thought was the easiest was refusing to have sex with a partner that would not use a condom (51.8% “Strongly agree”) and the safer sex behavior that participants thought to be the most difficult was asking a partner to get tested for STIs (54.5% “Disagree”). Attitudes, normative beliefs, and control beliefs combined to strongly predict intentions (R = .730, p < .001), and attitudes was the strongest predictor for intentions to practice safer sex behaviors (β = .666), 95% CI [.649, .711]. There was a significant positive correlation between vaccine acceptance and intentions to practice safer sex behaviors (r = .087, p < .001), including likelihood of getting vaccinated against HPV (r = .098, p < .001). Conclusions. Findings from this study demonstrate the need for university student health centers to provide information about the HPV vaccine as part of broader STI prevention and social marketing campaigns, targeting female college students who are single, as well as those in monogamous relationships. Furthermore, because young men can be carriers of HPV and the HPV vaccine is now available to them, follow-up studies are needed to determine acceptance of the HPV vaccine among male college students as it relates to HPV knowledge, knowledge of the vaccine, and intentions to practice safer sex behaviors.

This dissertation has made an attempt at exploring the psychological factors that motivates individuals into opting for or against undertaking an HIV-test. The Health Belief Model is used to ascertain its predictive powers towards the motivation for undertaking such a test. Literature on HIV-testing indicates non-exploration of voluntary HIV-testing, as opposed to massive reporting on mandatory HIV-testing. Therefore, the focus of this dissertation is on voluntary HIV-testing. The sample used for the study. comprised of antenatal mothers who were offered HIV/Aids education and then presented with an option of either undertaking the HIV-test, or not. The results of the study indicate that the Health Belief Model has failed in its predictive powers towards motivations for or against HIV-testing. However, the study provided valuable psychological factors that are associated with the decision to undertake the HIV-test, which will be important for future research on HIV/Aids and on the control in the spread of the disease. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1999.

The aim of the study is to assess the connection between women’s participation in breast cancer screening and beliefs towards breast cancer, breast self-examination and mammography. The objectives of the study: 1. To assess validity and reliability of Champion Health Belief Model Scale for beliefs towards breast cancer, breast self-examination and mammography screening for Lithuanian women. 2. To estimate perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, confidence and health motivation. 3. To compare beliefs towards breast cancer, breast self-examination and mammography screening of participant and non-participant women in the screening program. 4. To assess perceived barriers towards mammography screening. 5. To investigate the role of information about breast cancer and mammography screening for women‘s beliefs towards breast cancer, breast self-examination and mammography screening. CONCLUSIONS 1. Champion Health Belief Model Scale is a valid and reliable to assess beliefs towards breast cancer, breast self- examination and mammography. The barriers- mammography item “Regular mammography screening would make me worry about breast cancer” was inappropriate to the scale and expunged from the questionnaire. 2. Surveyed women did not feel much threat to get breast cancer. They overvalued benefits of breast self-examination and positively rated mammography screening. However, confidence to perform breast self-examination was properly low... [to full text] / Šio darbo tikslas buvo įvertinti atvykusių ir neatvykusių tikrintis mamografiškai moterų nuostatų į krūties vėžį, krūtų savityrą ir atrankinę mamografinę patikrą skirtumus. Tikslui pasiekti iškelti tokie uždaviniai: 1. Įvertinti Champion VL sveikatos įsitikinimų modelio klausimyno tinkamumą tirti Lietuvos moterų nuostatoms į krūties vėžį, krūtų savityrą ir atrankinę mamografinę patikrą. 2. Nustatyti moterų suvoktą krūties vėžio grėsmę, apsaugančios nuo krūties vėžio pasekmių elgsenos naudą ir kliūtis šiai veiklai, sveikos gyvensenos motyvaciją. 3. Palyginti atvykusių ir neatvykusių tirtis mamografiškai dėl krūties vėžio moterų nuostatas į krūties vėžį, krūtų savityrą ir atrankinę mamografinę patikrą. 4. Įvertinti dalyvavusių atrankinėje mamografinėje patikroje dėl krūties vėžio moterų kliūtis tirtis mamografiškai. 5. Ištirti papildomos informacijos apie krūties vėžį, mamografinę patikrą įtaką moterų nuostatoms į krūties vėžį, savityrą bei atrankinę mamografinę patikrą ir moterų dalyvavimui atrankinės patikros programoje. Išvados: 1. Patikrintas ir įteisintas VL Champion sveikatos įsitikinimų modelio skalės klausimynas yra tinkamas Lietuvos moterų nuostatoms į krūties vėžį, krūtų savityrą ir atrankinę mamografinę patikrą tirti. Sveikos gyvensenos motyvacijos skalė turi būti padalinta į požiūrio į sveiką gyvenseną ir veiklos sveikatos labui subskales. Kliūčių tirtis mamografiškai teiginys “reguliarus mamografinis ištyrimas verstų mane nerimauti dėl krūties vėžio” išbrauktas... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

This study investigated the challenges faced by implementers of VCT campaigns for higher education distance learning students. Qualitative and explorative approaches, using a case study, were employed as the research methodology. It has been concluded that the administrative planning procedures of VCT campaigns were not properly followed, which resulted in the following difficulties: defining the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders, using limited resources, and the inability to reach all the students, in order to get them to actively participate in the campaigns. Lack of coordination of HIV and AIDS activities and the absence of monitoring and evaluation also impacted negatively on the success of VCT campaigns. This study recommends that VCT campaigns have a proper task team constituting of experts in VCT campaign operations, in order to strategically plan and coordinate all the campaigns' activities. The implementers should also monitor and evaluate these activities on a regular basis.

The questionnaire text in English, Afrikaans and Native language / The aim of the study was to minimise non-adherence to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment amongst HIV/AIDS adult patients at a hospital in Namibia thereby promoting successful outcomes in patients on ARV treatment. A quantitative cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on a sample of 112 non-adherent adults. Data collection was through structured interviews and patients’ records review. Data analysis was by descriptive statistics. Rate of non-adherence was 36.7%. Characteristics common in the sample were, being a woman, age of 31-45 years, being unmarried, low educational status, lack of HIV status disclosure, feeling that taking ARVs reminded one of HIV and experience of ARV side effects. Reasons for missed doses included forgetting, alcohol use, access to care, work commitments, lack of food, stress and travelling. Of the respondents, 86.6% had unsupressed viral loads. Recommendations include use of reminders, automated SMS, establishing treatment supporters and collaborative efforts in reducing active substance use to improve adherence. / Health Studies / M.A. (Nursing Science)

The purpose of the study was to explore factors that influenced safer sex practices in Malawi. A quantitative, explorative, descriptive study was conducted to determine why the prevalence of new HIV infections was still high in Malawi despite. Questionnaires were used to collect data. Sexually active men, women, boys and girls that participated in the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation community awareness activities participated in this study. The study found that demographic, socio-economic and knowledge-related factors influence safer sex practices in Malawi. Various modifying factors played a role in influencing the individuals’ perception of susceptibility, severity, barriers and benefits of practising safer sex. The findings indicated that individuals generally had a broad knowledge of the spread and prevention of HIV. The Health Belief Model was used as theoretical framework for the study / Health Studies

abstract: Despite the arid climate of Maricopa County, Arizona, vector-borne diseases have presented significant health challenges to the residents and public health professionals of Maricopa County in the past, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Currently, West Nile virus is the only mosquitoes-transmitted disease actively, and natively, transmitted throughout the state of Arizona. In an effort to gain a more complete understanding of the transmission dynamics of West Nile virus this thesis examines human, vector, and environment interactions as they exist within Maricopa County. Through ethnographic and geographic information systems research methods this thesis identifies 1) the individual factors that influence residents' knowledge and behaviors regarding mosquitoes, 2) the individual and regional factors that influence residents' knowledge of mosquito ecology and the spatial distribution of local mosquito populations, and 3) the environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic factors that influence mosquito abundance within Maricopa County. By identifying the factors that influence human-vector and vector-environment interactions, the results of this thesis may influence current and future educational and mosquito control efforts throughout Maricopa County. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Sustainability 2013

Masters of Art / Intimate partner violence (IPV) has reached epidemic proportions in South Africa, prompting the government to pass the Domestic Violence Act 116 (1998). However, numerous scholars still believe that legislation is lacking due to inadequate implementation of protocol in the healthcare sector. In the healthcare setting, nurses are usually the first people that abused women make contact with and so they are in an excellent position to identify IPV victims and prevent further abuse. Routine universal screening in the healthcare setting is recommended as a means to identify women who suffer in abusive relationships. However, several problems have been encountered with the attempts to implement screening practices. In this study the various perceived barriers to IPV screening among nursing students were examined by use of a descriptive survey approach. The research participants were 103 nursing students from the University of the Western Cape. Data were collected by means of a selfadministered questionnaire and analysed using descriptive as a means to uncover the relationship between perceived barriers and the screening practices of the participants. The aim of this study was to identify the barriers that will discourage a nurse from routinely screening for intimate partner violence in a healthcare practice. The present study’s results indicated that the majority of variance in routinely screening for IPV can be explained by barriers related to HCP knowledge of managing IPV disclosure; the perceived responses of patients to screening; the privatisation of abuse; and whether HCP regard IPV as a healthcare issue. Information, regarding the beliefs of healthcare providers (HCP) with regard to IPV as well as the barriers they perceive toward screening, will be helpful in designing curricula that will successfully teach HCP how to screen for IPV and it will also be useful in making positive changes to the screening conditions in healthcare settings.

Approximately one in every seven American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. Men of African descent have higher incidence and mortality rates than others. Prostate cancer screening is important because the five-year survival rate is only 31% post-metastasis. The purpose of this study was to assess the likelihood of action for and factors influencing choice regarding prostate screenings. It was also to determine if a relationship existed between ethnicity (African American and Afro-Caribbean American men) and knowledge of prostate health, self-efficacy, perceived barriers to and belief regarding prostate screening. Data collection methods included a focus group (n = 8) among African American and Afro-Caribbean American men (M = 53.8, 10.3) and self-administered surveys (n = 113) among African American (n = 49, 45.4%) and Afro-Caribbean American (n = 38, 35.2%) men (M = 59.5, 16.4) from churches in South Florida using convenience sampling and the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a framework. Knowledge was assessed using a combined version of the Knowledge and Practice of Prostate Health Questionnaire and Prostate Cancer Screening Education (PROCASE) Knowledge Index. Self-efficacy was measured as decisional conflict reported from the Low Literacy Decisional Conflict Scale. Barriers were identified from a Perceived Barriers Survey. Beliefs were measured as spiritual well-being and evaluated using the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Spiritual Well-Being, a modified version for non-illness (FACIT-Sp Non-Illness). Almost half of African American (47.9%) and nearly a third (29%) of Afro-Caribbean American participants were unaware of participation or did not participate in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing. Findings indicated prostate screening concerns, inadequate knowledge, past negative experiences, and cost may contribute to low prostate screening rates. Both ethnicities did not differ in knowledge of prostate health or self-efficacy for making an informed decision regarding prostate screening. Potential targets for outreach efforts among these ethnic groups could include faith-based medical partnerships to diminish health disparities. Future intervention studies would benefit from a focus on diverse cultures and ethnicities in different settings and culturally appropriate strategies for nurses and other health professionals to use when assisting patients with informed decision making regarding prostate cancer screening.

The technological advances in wireless networks, smart phones, social networks, embedded sensor technologies and the wide spread of mobile devices have exposed customers to number of services. With these advanced technological innovations, computing capability and connectivity, customers look forward to get useful services and information by means of their mobile devices anywhere and at anytime thereby saving time and money. The importance of mobile commerce is increasing every day, since the mobile devices are becoming central part of our lives. One of the challenge here is the ability to reinforce the application behavior by utilizing context information. The analysis and utilization of context information is necessary to build intelligent applications and thereby focusing on less user attention by understanding the current situation. The information about the current location of a mobile customer, the time of request, and personal characteristics like nature of work, profession and economic status are utilized by applications to provide accurate context-aware services. Many of context-aware applications focus mainly on user activity, preferences which are not sufficient to provide context-aware intelligent services. However, there are few works in developing an integrated model for analyzing the context information. Many authors describe the context representation using five elements like who, what, where, when and how to provide a user centric view without emphasizing on the feature of generality and structural representation of context parameters. Since context information takes multiple forms, it is essential and necessary to make broad classification which helps application designers and developers to deal with possible contexts and their impact on application behavior. In addition, the context classification enables to understand complex customer situations due to changing mobile environment. Therefore, it is required to design a model which analyzes the context information of customers in a dynamic environment and hence, provide real time accurate service. The design and development of context-aware mobile commerce services requires a general conceptual model which can handle any type of context information for different applications. Due to the dynamic nature of business environment and also the customer preferences keep emerging, there is a need to develop business model which adapts to changing environment. To understand the current situation of customers in such highly dynamic environments and to enable the business transactions quickly among parties involved, it is essential to construct and analyze an integrated view of information from distinct sources. The adaptation of the provided services based on customer needs depends when the relevant context information is self-described in the form of beliefs. The observations made on combination of context information are deduced into beliefs as a result the decision making time to provide service reduces considerably. The aim of the thesis, is to design and develop a context-aware system which has been applied for mobile commerce environment by considering the customer context information. To do this, we have designed two models: the Context-Information, Observation and Belief (C-IOB)model and the commercial business model. The main function of C-IOB model is to support the application to identify a suitable context-aware service and to execute business transaction for a customer by analyzing the context information in the form of beliefs. We classify the used Context Information(CI)into four types: physical, system, application and social environment. The business model discusses the formal description of participants who are involved in commercial business. The C-IOB model The Context Information, Observation and Belief model deduces beliefs on customer, by combination of available context information during transaction execution or service provision. The beliefs represent the various situations of customers based on specific nature of the applications. The beliefs developed about an entity(e.g. ,person, place, thing) are primitive in most theories of decision making so that applications can use these beliefs to identify and execute context-aware services. The C-IOB model reduces the solution search space, since the knowledge about an entity is organized using cognitive factors, which maps user context information into real world observations and beliefs, as a result the decision making time by the system reduces considerably. The five CI -constructs: who, what, where, when and how enable many types of context information acquisition in our work. The commercial business model A commercial business model mainly involves the formal description of business participants who are involved in commercial business transactions. To meet the growing needs and to fulfill high expectations of customers, it is very important that application designers have to address the issue of building viable business models for commercial environment. The business model describes how an enterprise or an organization captures and delivers economical value to customers. In particular, the customers play major role in transactions execution and hence understanding and identifying the needs of customer is an important issue in building the business model for commercial purpose. Mobile Commerce Environment Mobile commerce environment (MCE) is one of the specific forms of commercial business model. It deals with transactions like purchases with the objective of supplying commodities like goods and services to customers using mobile devices. A Mobile commerce environment is established by considering set of customers, vendors and bankers, who are involved in commercial business activities like buying of electronic goods and services. The environment is based on certain factors like the type of customers, the type of transactions and the type of electronic products involved in purchasing. M-commerce is one of the most effective and useful ways of conducting business as the customers are constantly using mobile devices and it significantly assists customers in making transactions anywhere, anytime and thereby improving the customer satisfaction. C-IOB model based mobile commerce environment Mobile commerce applications are required to be flexible, in providing services due to inherent anytime and anywhere paradigm. The traditional systems during commercial business transactions, take large time to search the right product, which leads to more utilization of device resources like memory and computational power. In addition, the users are striked with more information which is not significant. Therefore, there is a need to design applications, which identify the customer requirements by acquiring the context information from distinct sources and thereby providing timely and specific information or services to the customer. Hence, to adapt services based on various situations, it is required to develop a systematic approach for representation and utilization of context information modified to special characteristics of mobile commerce applications. The mobile commerce environment uses C-IOB model for analyzing the relevant context information of customers and the context based beliefs helps to identify a suitable service for an end customer, thereby reducing mobile transaction execution time and providing customer benefits. The simulation environment consists of 10,000 electronic products which are categorized based on technical and commercial features. The simulation is carried out with ten mobile commerce transactions, the database consists of information about500 customers and 100vendors who deal with electronic products selling and10bankersfor money transactions. The customer context information is acquired from physical, system, application and social environment. When customers ends are quest for a service, the current context information is acquired, a set of observations is formulated and belief is deduced. The customer is provided with relevant information or service based on deduced belief. The simulation exhaustively tests the working of the system for mobile commerce transactions under different context environments. Some of the case studies are designed by applying the C-IOB model which includes placing the purchase order for the product, money transfer and after sales service. In summary, we have developed a context-aware system by using C-IOB model and also the design of commercial business model. To evaluate the performance of the system, we have incorporated context-awareness aspect for 10 business transactions applied to mobile commerce. The proposed system using C-IOB model provides customer required services as accurately as possible. The system has the capability to adapt to real time situation of customer needs, thereby enhancing the customer satisfaction. The simulation results have shown that the time to execute mobile commerce transactions is less using context based beliefs compared to context unaware approach. The accuracy of the system with belief based approach is higher than without context information. The customer benefits in business transaction are also enhanced by our design approach.