DVD-based HIV/HCV Intervention for Drug-Involved Latino Criminal Justice Clients

The specific aims for Stage1b are: (1) to pilot test and evaluate the effectiveness of the DVD-based HIV intervention by recruiting 210 Latino offenders mandated to substance abuse treatment; and (2) to evaluate both participant and interventionist acceptability of this novel DVD intervention. Participants will be recruited from a local community agency that provides outpatient substance abuse treatment services for court-mandated individuals. Eligible participants will be self-identified Latino/Hispanic, between the ages of 18 and 49, heterosexual, and all participants will be involved with the criminal justice system. Participants will be randomized into either an intervention or a wait-list control condition. The intervention consists of one DVD-based group session facilitated by an interventionist. Sexual risk, drug use, mental health, and background information will be assessed at baseline, and again at 3 months after the intervention session. At the end of the intervention session, each participant will complete an acceptability questionnaire, and the interventionist will complete a checklist to assess treatment fidelity. It is hypothesized that both sexual risk and drug use behaviors will decrease between baseline and follow-up for the intervention group compared to the control group. The project is innovative because it will develop a DVD-based, culturally-appropriate and language specific, HIV/Hepatitis C virus prevention intervention for Latino offenders. The proposed research is significant, because it is expected to produce a brief HIV/Hepatitis C virus intervention that can be implemented within the criminal justice system and targets a high risk group.

It is hypothesized that participants in the intervention condition will report significant reductions in sexual risk behaviors (e.g., unprotected sexual contact) and drug risk behaviors (e.g. sharing injection equipment, drug use while having sex) from baseline to 3 - month follow-up when compared to control group. The main analysis here is to compare the proportion (or mean) of primary outcomes for those measured at 3-month (post-intervention) to those measured at baseline (pre-intervention) between the intervention and control group. The null is that there will be no differences, and alternative hypotheses would be that the intervention group will report more of a reduction in risk behaviors than control group. These hypotheses can be tested by either repeated-measures ANCOVA or regression with the robust cluster estimator obtained after controlling for intervention condition.