Personal strategies for HIV prevention: The development and validation of a strategy-coding instrument

This paper describes the development of a coding instrument to classify, co llege students' strategies for preventing HIV infection, and examines the a ssociation of distinct strategies with social cognitive and behavioral meas ures related to safer sexual behavior. This instrument classifies each stra tegy into both a content domain (e.g., using condoms, remaining abstinent, limiting sexual partners), and 3 distinct dimensions: commitment, specifici ty, and effectiveness. We examine the reliability and validity of this inst rument by showing the discriminative associations of each dimension with so cial cognitive and behavioral measures, and demonstrate the differential im portance of distinct dimensions in predicting behavior in different content domains. Discussion focuses on the importance of tailoring HIV prevention messages to change strategy dimensions in order to maximize behavior change .