Return to Table of ContentsApril 1998
Professor Awarded NIMH Grant
for HIV/AIDS ResearchThis summer, Prof. Deborah Brome of the psychology department will begin working at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) on research that aims to discover critical information on how African American adolescents perceive themselves sexually, how they view male-female relationships, and how these views relate to their effective life skills. The long-term goal of this research is to provide information that can be used to create effectual HIV/AIDS intervention education programs in minority communities.
Brome is one of 12 researchers to be selected to participate in the National Institute of Mental Health's (NIMH) Collaborative HIV Prevention Research in Minority Communities Program. She will receive a $25,000 stipend, summer salary, and technical assistance from the program, which is based at UCSF. It is a three-year program.
For Brome, conducting research with the purpose of informing HIV/AIDS prevention is just a step away from what she has been working on over the past eight years. "My background is in substance abuse research evaluation, and HIV prevention has always been a part of that," says Brome, who has been a principal evaluator of two five-year Center for Substance Abuse demonstration programs.
One program was a prevention and peer-education program targeting 5th to 10th grade African American adolescents. The other, the New Directions Family Program, targeted families with at least one parent in recovery from drug or alcohol abuse, and children between the ages of 6 and 14. The psychosocial competence of the children was evaluated as an outcome variable of the program.
Brome uses a conceptualization of psychosocial competence which she credits to her mentor, Professor Emeritus Forrest Tyler of the University of Maryland, College Park. It includes three elements: self- efficacy attitudes (the belief that you have control over your circumstances), self-world relationships (such as trust) and behavioral coping styles (a contextual ability to act on your own behalf).
Adolescents high in psychosocial competence reported a lower number of risk behaviors, according to Brome's past research. These results relate directly to Brome's long-term objective to provide an informational foundation for interventions aimed at reducing high risk sexual and drug-related behaviors.
Brome will be undertaking at least two studies--first, a qualitative one will use focus groups to find out how African American adolescents assess themselves as sexual beings and explore how they characterize male-female relationships. This will help develop interview protocols.
A second, quantitative study will pilot protocols with a group of 50 adolescents to establish validity. Protocols will then be administered to a group of 150 adolescents. The results will provide a foundation for establishing a set of sexual styles among African American adolescents.The next step would be an examination of how various prevention interventions work for individuals with identified sexual styles.
"What most interests me is capturing adolescents' voices and ideas. Many television programs, for example, have a limited idea of how the average teenager thinks about relationships and sexuality," says Brome. "So we end up with generic programs. I think I will end up advocating for adolescents based on what we learn about how they think, and we can be more effective that way," she adds.
Brome joined the faculty in 1983. She is co-author of a 1991 book, Ecology, Ethnic Validity and Psychotherapy: A Psychosocial Competence Model, and the author of numerous book chapters and papers. She received her BS in psychology from Brown University, and her MA in psychology and Ph.D. in clinical/community psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park.