Jessica Perkins
Vanderbilt University, TN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Young people often guess wrong about how their peers behave. They may think friends drink more, or protect themselves less, than they really do, and these wrong guesses can push them toward riskier choices.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
sexually transmitted infections
HIV prevention
alcohol use
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Explore how adolescents and young adults in three rural Ugandan secondary schools perceive peer norms around alcohol use, HIV/STI transmission risk and prevention, using qualitative methods.
- Estimate the causal effects of perceived peer norms about alcohol use and transmission risk behavior on HIV/STI prevention, using a population-based cohort of adolescents and young adults.
- Test, in a mixed-methods randomized controlled trial, whether personalized normative feedback (accurate data on actual peer behavior) changes behavioral intentions, heavy alcohol use and HIV/STI prevention.
- Test whether shifts in perceived norms are the mechanism through which personalized normative feedback affects drinking and prevention behavior.
More about the research
Adolescents and young adults accounted for more than 400,000 new HIV infections worldwide in 2021. Heavy drinking is a strong and changeable risk factor for behavior that spreads HIV. Yet few studies in places hard hit by HIV ask how misperceived peer norms drive drinking and transmission risk, or how to correct those misperceptions.
Why it matters
Heavy drinking raises HIV and STI transmission risk among young people in high-burden regions such as rural Uganda. If correcting false beliefs about peer behavior reduces heavy drinking and increases prevention uptake, schools and health programs could adopt norms-correction strategies. These could help adolescents and young adults lower their infection risk.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kristen Mark
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Conduct a social ecological needs assessment of reproductive and sexual health care delivery for persons with disabilities in Tanzania, interviewing about 20 persons with disabilities and 20 caregivers about their experiences accessing care.
Fanghui Shi
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Build computable phenotype algorithms that identify sexually transmitted infection (STI) patterns from electronic health records and survey data in the All of Us research program.
Kimberly Mallett
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Psychology
Assess the feasibility of adding personalized transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC) feedback, based on wearable skin sensors that track alcohol levels, to the eCHECKUP TO GO intervention for high-risk college drinkers.
The school
Vanderbilt University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 494 research doctorates a year.
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