VALIDATING POPULATION SURVEYS FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF HIV STD PREVENTION INDICATORS

Objective: To validate the World Health Organization/Global Programme on AIDS (CPA) protocol for measuring HIV/sexually transmitted disease prevention indicators pertaining to knowledge and sexual practices of the general population. Methods: Data were collected in Uganda during 1993. Three different interview strategies were complemented with qual itative methods, including observations at visits and key-informant in terviews. Two interview strategies consisted oi structured questionnai res which were applied to 460 randomly selected people aged 15-49 year s and 60 intentionally selected women who were known prostitutes. The third strategy involved in-depth interviewing and was applied to a ran dom subset of all respondents (n = 75). Results: The three interview s trategies generated similar results for demographic characteristics. T he strategies using structured questionnaires gave similar results wit h regards to the number of reported sex partners and the prevalence of condom use, but differed from in-depth interviews on these aspects. T he high numbers of casual sex partners of female prostitutes was confi rmed by in-depth interviews but not via the questionnaires. Conclusion : The GPA questionnaire may not be optimal to capture people at high r isk and to assess sexual behaviour, especially oi people at high risk. Nevertheless, the questionnaire provides the most realistic option, s ince in-depth interviews are expensive and not as objective in assessi ng trends over time. Evaluation studies of HIV interventions in the ge neral population should therefore be complemented with small qualitati ve studies to detect and iron out biases in interpreting results.