Paper
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Incorporating HIV Status Into the Analysis of an Intervention Study
Phyllis Shanley Hansell, EdD, RN, FAAN and Wendy C. Budin, RN, BC, PhD. College of Nursing, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA
| Learning Objective #1: Understand the effect of HIV/AIDS status relative to the further advancement of a multivariate design to test the effect of an intervention within an experimental design |
| Learning Objective #2: Incorporate HIV/AIDS status into the analysis plan to control for threats to internal validity, thus avoiding acceptance of the null hypothesis when it is false |
PURPOSE:The purpose was to test the effect of a social support boosting intervention on stress,coping and social support in caregivers of HIV children. FRAMEWORK: The Stress Coping model of Lazarus and Folkman was used. DESIGN:A pretest post-test experimental design was used. with a randomly assigned sample that was stratified by caregiver type(biological,extended family and foster parent)thus both experimental group and control group included caregivers that were sero-positive and sero-negative.Subjects included 70 subjects who completed all interventions and measures(Derogatis,F-COPES and the Tilden Social Support)for 6 months. ANALYSIS: The MANCOVA analysis when implemented as planned by group resulted in no significant differences. When this was considered within the context of the analyes on the baseline data which showed that there was a statistically significant difference at the P >.01 level on all study variables when Sero-Negative and Sero-Positive Caregivers were compaired. Data were further analysed incorporating HIV status into the MANCOVA analysis model that resulted in between group statistically significant differences for Sero-Negative Caregivers at P>.01 and no differenec for Sero-positive Caregivers. DISCUSSION: This research found that the social support boosting intervention did indeed work for Sero-Negative Caregivers but not for Sero-Positive Caregivers. These findings are important because they have demonstrated that the intervention substantially helped Sero-Positive Caregivers whereas the need for further research on the testing of interventions to mitigate strees and facilitate coping is needed. An important lesson learned from the analyses of this study is that an such illness such as HIV can intervene as a threat to the internal validity of a study when not incorporsted into the analysis that may result in the acceptance of the null hypothesis when in fact it should be rejected especially for caregivers whose negative HIV ststus results in an intervention that is effective to decrease stress,faciltate coping and increse social support.
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Sigma Theta Tau International
July 22-24, 2004