Podcast Interview Transcript
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In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Alexandra Lightfoot and Melvin Jackson authors of “In My House”: Laying the Foundation for Youth HIV Prevention in the Black Church and PCHP Associate Editor Jess Holzer.
Dr. Lightfoot and Mr. Jackson, thank you very much for talking with us today about your article, In My House, laying the foundation for adolescent HIV prevention in the Black church. Could we get started by just describing in brief the project that you wrote about in the manuscript? Especially the purpose of the project and the lesson you learned from the process.
This kind of a progress lessons learned paper that looks at our partnership process that we took as we reached out to try and implement an HIV prevention curriculum for youth in two Black churches in southeastern Raleigh, North Carolina. And we really looked at what our partnership did. How we engaged the community advisory board. We found a fantastic project coordinator who spoke the language of the churches to figure out a way to open the door to this HIV prevention work. And largely because the Black church, at least in Raleigh, North Carolina, often doesn’t want to engage in some of the aspects of HIV prevention, in particular, condom demonstrations, which are a core aspect of evidence-based intervention we had identified that we wanted to use.
You mentioned that you had this great partnership, could talk a little bit more about how your community advisory board was composed for the project, and then whether or not they’re still working with you on everything that you’re doing today.
Our community advisory board was developed at the beginning of the project, and that’s something we try to do in all of our projects. And given that we were trying to do this work in churches, we were interested in identifying a diverse group of people to be on the committee, but we also were interested in both youth and adult church leaders.
Through our project coordinator, she was able to identify a very diverse group of individuals. We not only wanted people on the advisory board who agreed with what we were doing, but also those church leaders that had some opposition to doing HIV, STD education in the church setting. So we pulled together a group of individuals. There were high school students. There were college students. We had church leaders. We had ministers there. We also had a professor, a retired professor from the university. [End Page 457]
You mention in the manuscript itself that you did have some difference of opinion as to how that could move forward with HIV prevention training with the students, particularly that there’s a real difference of opinion on whether or not to do abstinence on the education, or to do this fully fleshed out, abstinence-highlighting education, but also included things like condom demonstrations. So how did you negotiate that disagreement, and move forward with the project that you used?
One thing I just wanted to say is that, this work was building on 20 years of work by Strengthening The Black Family, a community-based organization where Melvin is the program director, of doing Teens Against AIDS, which was community-based, peer-driven HIV prevention intervention. And it worked in so many different community settings.
A few years before coming together to do this work, they had done a series of focus groups with parents and youth in the community. And the parents and youth had really just as I said, it’s really important that we reach out to churches and yet Teens Against AIDS had not been able to work in...
