This study described sexual behaviours among adolescents living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Zimbabwe. This study utilised a quantitative descriptive design. Data was collected using structured questionnaires from 341 adolescents living with HIV. Findings revealed that some adolescents were sexually active and had early onset of sexual activity (before their sixteenth birthday). A good proportion of sexually active adolescents were noted not to practise safer sex and the main reason was condom inaccessibility and some had multiple sex partners. Factors independently associated with being sexually active included exposure to erotic content on television programmes, having a psychiatric diagnosis, discussions of sexuality with health worker and older age. Adolescents` behaviours living with HIV and the issue of availability of condoms may play a part in the spread of HIV. More discussions and research on sexuality of adolescents are recommended / Health Studies / M.A. (Public Health)

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

Tyrimo tikslas – įvertinti seksualinio elgesio motyvų svarbą studentų rizikingo seksualinio elgesio ir asmenybės bruožų sąsajai. Tyrime dalyvavo 319 Klaipėdos universiteto studentų, iš jų seksualinę patirtį turėjo 241 studentai (75,5 proc.). Tyrime buvo naudojami seksualinio elgesio motyvų, saugaus seksualinio elgesio motyvacijos, seksualinio elgesio klausimai, Didžiojo penketo asmenybės klausimynas ir polinkio rizikuoti klausimynas. Išanalizavus rezultatus nustatyta, jog vyrų seksualinis elgesys rizikingesnis nei moterų. Seksualinę patirtį prognozuoja vyresnis amžius, labiau išreikštas polinkis rizikuoti, labiau išreikšti malonumo motyvai. Taip pat nustatyta, jog didėjant studentų ekstraversijai, mažėjant sutariamumui bei didėjant polinkiui rizikuoti, didėja rizikingas seksualinis elgesys. Sąžiningumas, neurotiškumas, atvirumas patirčiai, impulsyvumas nėra susiję su rizikingu seksualiniu elgesiu. Didėjant studentų malonumo, įveikos, savęs pastiprinimo ir partnerio palankumo motyvams bei mažėjant studentų vidinei motyvacijai, rizikingas seksualinis elgesys didėja. Intymumo ir bendraamžių palankumo motyvai nėra susiję su rizikingu seksualiniu elgesiu. Sutariamumo ir rizikingo seksualinio elgesio ryšį prognozuoja didesni intymumo motyvai ir mažesnė vidinė saugaus seksualinio elgesio motyvacija. Sąžiningumo ryšį su rizikingu seksualiniu elgesiu prognozuoja mažesni įveikos/ savęs pastiprinimo motyvai. Polinkio rizikuoti ryšį su rizikingu seksualiniu elgesiu prognozuoja didesni... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The aim of the study was to assess the importance of Sexual Behavior Motives in prediction of between Student‘s Risky Sexual Behavior and Personality Traits. The subjects of the study were 319 student of Klaipeda university. 241 (75,5 percent) of them had sexual experience. In this research motives for sex questionnaire, motivation of safer sexual behavior questionnaire, sexual behavior questions, Big Five Personality questionnaire and Risk Taking Propensity questionnaire were used. The statistic analysis showed that men sexual behavior is riskier than women. Sexual experience predicted elder age, increase risk taking propensity and increase enhancement motives. Statistic analysis also showed that student’s increased risky sexual behavior is related to increase of extraversion and risk taking propensity and decrease of agreeableness. Student’s personality traits: conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience are not related to risky sexual behavior. Student risky sexual behavior increase when student’s enhancement, coping, affirmation, partner approval motives increase and student’s intrinsic motivation decrease. Intimacy and peer approval motives are not related to risky sexual behavior. Correlation of agreeableness and risky sexual behavior is predicted by increase intimacy motives and decrease intrinsic motivation. Correlation of conscientiousness and risky sexual behavior is predicted by decrease coping/ affirmation motives. Correlation of risk taking... [to full text]

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

Finite element human body models have in recent years become widely used in the area of vehicle safety evaluations. They make it possible to predict injury risk in specific areas, down to the organ level in the human body. An existing human body model, SAFER HBM includes a rib cage representing an average male. However, humans have a large variability in rib geometry and material properties leading to uncertainties in non-linear phenomena such as rib fracture risk. Hence, it cannot be known if predictions based on an average male representation are applicable to other similar individuals. In simulation studies with the SAFER HBM, rib cortical bone thickness, rib cross-sectional width, and rib cortical bone material properties have been identified as the most influential for the magnitude of rib strains and thus, they have a large influence on the strain-based rib fracture risk. This means that the predicted injury outcome is sensitive to the particular rib properties of an individual, and in a real-world scenario, a distribution of injury outcomes is expected across a population. Knowledge of the injury risk distribution can aid vehicle designers in developing safer vehicles. This distribution can be found through repeated human body model simulations with various rib properties, but due to the lengthy simulation times, this is not feasible. This thesis aims to predict human body model rib strain histories, given variations in the three biomechanical parameters, rib cortical bone thickness, rib cross-section width and rib cortical bone material with the help of graph neural networks (GNNs) for both single and mixed impact scenarios. Several variations of GNNs were used and implemented with help of PyTorch and PyTorch Geometric. An extensive hyperparameter study was performed on a small part of one human body model rib, to find the optimal combinations of hyperparameters and GNNs. The data used in training and evaluation of the networks was generated in LS-DYNA with SAFER HBM v10 and post-processed in Meta post processor. To be able to generate many training examples, the HBM was subjected to a simplified impact scenario consisting of a pendulum impact to the chest. As final verification, the trained GNNs were applied to predict rib strains in a vehicle impact scenario. Evaluation of the GNNs' prediction accuracy on the whole rib cage for all impact scenarios was made by studying the root mean square error along with differences in predicted and actual peak strain, rib fracture risk, time the peak strain occurs and the euclidean distance between the locations within the rib of real and predicted peak strains. The results showed that it is possible to accurately predict strain histories. Further, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model consistently achieved the lowest errors in all measurements for mixed impacts. However, the trained model produced slightly unexpected errors for test data extracted from vehicle simulations compared to simplified simulations. This is an indication that retraining the model on data from vehicle simulations may be necessary. In conclusion, this thesis has shown the possibility to predict strain histories from a SAFER HBM rib cage extracted from simplified simulations and simulations including the full vehicle model, the SAFER HBM and all safety systems, to investigate the effects of human variability in the rib cage.

This study described sexual behaviours among adolescents living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Zimbabwe. This study utilised a quantitative descriptive design. Data was collected using structured questionnaires from 341 adolescents living with HIV. Findings revealed that some adolescents were sexually active and had early onset of sexual activity (before their sixteenth birthday). A good proportion of sexually active adolescents were noted not to practise safer sex and the main reason was condom inaccessibility and some had multiple sex partners. Factors independently associated with being sexually active included exposure to erotic content on television programmes, having a psychiatric diagnosis, discussions of sexuality with health worker and older age. Adolescents` behaviours living with HIV and the issue of availability of condoms may play a part in the spread of HIV. More discussions and research on sexuality of adolescents are recommended / Health Studies / M.A. (Public Health)

This dissertation examines the different depictions of ‘immigrants’ and the ways in which migration, ethnicity and racism have been handled by Swedish HIV/AIDS policy since the early 1980s. The dissertation consists of five separate articles and an introductory chapter that outlines the discourse-theoretical approach used in the subsequent articles. The introduction also provides a contextual framework by summarizing recent research on, and sketching a background to, HIV/AIDS policy development in Sweden. The dissertation argues that, although the policy discourse early on established that inducing safer sex practices among the Swedish population was the only viable solution to the pandemic, the discourse is nonetheless permeated by notions of unsafe identities. The dissertation also stresses the importance of scrutinizing HIV/AIDS policy in light of broader political developments, and argues that an increasing focus on migrants in HIV/AIDS policy should not be seen as a simple reflection of the global epidemiological development, but should rather be understood in relation to the general political and economic phenomenon of welfare state retrenchment. Applying postcolonial feminist theories, the dissertation reveals how the policy discourse is permeated by conceptions of migrant cultures as not susceptible to change but steeped in tradition and primordiality, alongside racialized fantasies about Africa as the ‘dark continent’ and the source of disease. It also discusses how both masculinity and femininity, as well as heterosexuality and homosexuality, feature in the policy discourse as demarcations between Western and non-Western subjects – between whites and blacks and between Swedes and non-Swedes – and identifies the challenges that such knowledge implies for feminist HIV/AIDS research and policy. / Denna studie undersöker hur frågor om migration, etnicitet och rasism hanteras i svensk hiv/aids-policy från 1980-talet fram till idag. Avhandlingen består av fem artiklar och ett introduktionskapitel som presenterar tidigare forskning och det diskursteoretiska ramverket som studien utgår från. Introduktionen innehåller även en presentation av hur svensk hiv/aids-policy utvecklats genom åren. Avhandlingen visar att trots att policydiskursen tidigt lyfte fram att säkrare sexuella praktiker är av avgörande betydelse i kampen mot hiv/aids, så vilar diskursen ändå på en föreställning om säkra och osäkra identiteter. Avhandlingen poängterar också vikten av att studera hiv/aids policy i relation till en samtida politisk och ekonomisk utveckling och ställer sig kritiskt till att förklara ett ökat fokus på invandring i policydiskursen enbart med hänvisning till den globala epidemiologiska utvecklingen. Det empiriska materialet består av policydokument och sexualupplysnings-material. Analysen av materialet visar att policydiskursen vilar på föreställningar om statiska ‘invandrarkulturer’ och rasifierade fantasier om Afrika och sjukdomens ursprung. Studien visar också hur såväl maskulinitet och femininitet, som heterosexualitet och homosexualitet, fungerar som markörer mellan västerländska och icke-västerländska subjekt – mellan vita och svarta och mellan svenskar och icke-svenskar – och diskuterar vad detta innebär för feministisk hiv/aids-forskning.

This study consisted of a qualitative analysis of articles from two Canadian newspapers related to North America’s only safe injection facility for drug users, Vancouver’s Insite, and examined the texts for latent themes derived from a review of harm reduction and governmentality literature. The investigation asked “In what ways are Insite and its clients represented in the media and what implications do those portrayals have in terms of Insite’s operation as a harm reduction practice as well as a governmental strategy designed to direct the conduct of drug users who visit the site?” The analysis revealed conflicting representations, some which have positive potential in terms of Insite’s adherence to the fundamental principles of harm reduction and others that undermined those principles and suggested that the site may have traditional governmental functions, perhaps indicating less distance between the harm reduction and governmentality philosophies in the discourse surrounding the SIS than expected.

This study consisted of a qualitative analysis of articles from two Canadian newspapers related to North America’s only safe injection facility for drug users, Vancouver’s Insite, and examined the texts for latent themes derived from a review of harm reduction and governmentality literature. The investigation asked “In what ways are Insite and its clients represented in the media and what implications do those portrayals have in terms of Insite’s operation as a harm reduction practice as well as a governmental strategy designed to direct the conduct of drug users who visit the site?” The analysis revealed conflicting representations, some which have positive potential in terms of Insite’s adherence to the fundamental principles of harm reduction and others that undermined those principles and suggested that the site may have traditional governmental functions, perhaps indicating less distance between the harm reduction and governmentality philosophies in the discourse surrounding the SIS than expected.

This study consisted of a qualitative analysis of articles from two Canadian newspapers related to North America’s only safe injection facility for drug users, Vancouver’s Insite, and examined the texts for latent themes derived from a review of harm reduction and governmentality literature. The investigation asked “In what ways are Insite and its clients represented in the media and what implications do those portrayals have in terms of Insite’s operation as a harm reduction practice as well as a governmental strategy designed to direct the conduct of drug users who visit the site?” The analysis revealed conflicting representations, some which have positive potential in terms of Insite’s adherence to the fundamental principles of harm reduction and others that undermined those principles and suggested that the site may have traditional governmental functions, perhaps indicating less distance between the harm reduction and governmentality philosophies in the discourse surrounding the SIS than expected.