THE USE OF THEORY-BASED SEMISTRUCTURED ELICITATION QUESTIONNAIRES - FORMATIVE RESEARCH FOR CDC PREVENTION MARKETING INITIATIVE

THROUGH ONE OF ITS MANY HIV prevention programs, the Prevention Market ing Initiative, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promote s a multifaceted strategy for preventing the sexual transmission of HI V/AIDS among people less than 25 years of age,The Prevention Marketing Initiative is an application of marketing and consumer-oriented techn ologies that rely heavily on behavioral research and behavior change t heories to bring the behavioral and social sciences to bear on practic al program planning decisions. One objective of the Prevention Marketi ng Initiative is to encourage consistent and correct condom use among sexually active young adults. Qualitative formative research is being conducted in several segments of the population of heterosexually acti ve, unmarried young adults between 18 and 25 using a semistructured el icitation procedure to identify and understand underlying behavioral d eterminants of consistent condom use. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of this type of qualitative research methodology in designing effective theory-based behavior change interventions. Issue s of research design and data collection and analysis are discussed. T o illustrate the methodology, results of content analyses of selected responses to open-ended questions on consistent condom use are present ed by gender (male, female), ethnic group (white,African American), an d consistency of condom use (always, sometimes). This type of formativ e research can be applied immediately to designing programs and is inv aluable for valid and relevant larger-scale quantitative research.