Is hope associated with HIV-acquisition risk and intimate partner violence amongst young women and men? A cross-sectional study in urban informal settlements in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Hope is a concept that may mediate between the structural constraints people live under and their HIV-acquisition risk behaviours/experiences. Drawing on data collected as the baseline for an intervention trial between September 2015 and September 2016, among young (18–30-year-old), out-of-school women and men in urban informal settlements in Durban, South Africa, we assess whether hope, assessed by the Snyder Hope Scale, is associated with HIV-risk behaviours/experiences. 677 women (35.5%; 33.7%; 30.9%; low, medium, and high hope scores respectively) and 668 men (40.6%; 32.8%; 26.7%; low, medium, and high hope scores respectively) were included. Among women, adjusted analyses showed high levels of hope, compared to low levels, were associated with greater modern contraceptive use (aOR1.57, 1.04–2.37). For men, medium or high levels of hope, compared to low levels, were associated with reduced physical and/or sexual IPV perpetration (med: aOR0.55, 0.38–0.81, high: 0.38, 0.25–0.57), emotional IPV perpetration (med: aOR0.54, 0.36–0.80, high: aOR0.62, 0.41–0.94) and transactional sex (med: 0.57, 0.38–0.84, high: aOR0.57, 0.39–0.86) respectively. For men, hope potentially captured a pathway between an individual’s structural context and their HIV-risk behaviour. Yet this was not the case for women. It may be the Snyder Hope Scale does not adequately capture localised meanings of hope.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants who generously provided their information and time, the fieldwork teams who collected the data in challenging circumstances, and the wider research team involved in the original project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data are freely available in a public, open-access repository. De-identified data sets for the project are available from http://medat.samrc.ac.za/index.php/catalog/WW managed by the South African Medical Research Council.

Additional information

Funding

AG: funding for initial study was received from the DFID funded programme, What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls? Global Programme. Funding for this analysis was through the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, Context and Health Grant (MR/T029803/1). Funding was managed by the South African Medical Research Council.