Examining strategies for culturally grounded HIV prevention: a review

Since the early 1990s culture has been considered an essential concept for understanding the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the prevention of HIV (Parker, 2001). Despite consensus that culture is an important issue in HIV prevention programming, the field lacks a common vision for how culture ought to inform intervention design and implementation. In this article, we review the HIV prevention literature published through 2001 to examine interventions that have explicitly sought to address cultural concepts. We describe the types of strategies used to integrate culture into HIV prevention, how culture has been evaluated as a component of preventive interventions, and to whom these culturally grounded programs are targeted. We highlight gaps in the current body of literature and provide recommendations for future research on culturally grounded HIV prevention programs.