Effective methods to cut back younger men’s risk of HIV and other STDs should take into account several points of sexual behavior, including condom use; companion concurrency; and the quantity, frequency and varieties of partners. Our findings counsel that some men have intercourse with risky companions but use condoms quite regularly with these partners, whereas other males interact in a number of partnerships and tend to make use of condoms with substantially much less frequency. Just 39 of these trajectories characterized 90% of the men. Research on different varieties of trajectories has typically observed that a big plurality (20-30%) of people fall in one or two trajectories, which might therefore be described as normative.24 In contrast, the commonest trajectory we observed (not participating in intercourse in Waves 1 and a pair of after which being within the low-danger/excessive-protection cluster in Wave 3) characterized solely 7% of the younger men, and the proportions have been much smaller for the following most frequent trajectories. Despite the small proportions of men in the person trajectories, common patterns did emerge.
For the 1,290 young men who participated in all three waves, we determined respondents’ cumulative risk group-whether they’d at all times been in either the no-heterosexual-intercourse group or a decrease risk group, had ever been in one of the higher threat teams but not in each, or had been in both of the high-danger teams. Then, we assessed the STD measures by cumulative threat group membership. By tracing membership stability in and shifts amongst threat teams as younger males move from adolescence into early adulthood, we take full benefit of the longitudinal nature of NSAM. Between the first and second waves, 4 of the 5 risk teams confirmed marked stability (Table 4). The low-risk/low-protection and plenty of-companions/some-safety groups had been notably stable, as 61% of the men who had been in the former group at Wave 1 and 48% of those that had been in the latter group had been in the same group in Wave 2. Alarmingly, 23% of males who had been within the no-heterosexual-intercourse group in Wave 1 had moved right into a high-danger group by Wave 2. Meanwhile, members of the two high-danger groups at Wave 1 who transitioned into a brand new category by Wave 2 had been most certainly to maneuver to the low-risk/low-protection group.
Thirty-5 p.c of younger men within the dangerous-companions/high-safety cluster and 28% of those in the numerous-partners/some-protection group showed this pattern. In NSAM, these two high-threat groups have been distinct; though both had increased charges of STDs than did low-threat groups, males who belonged to the numerous-companions/some-safety cluster for a number of waves reported markedly larger levels of previous and recent STDs than did men in the other high-risk group. Men with membership in the latter group had higher rates on two of the three STD measures than males who were all the time in a low-threat group and people in the dangerous-companions/excessive-safety group. Eight of the ten most common trajectories concerned solely the low-risk teams, and males in these trajectories constituted 41% of the sample. Because Kruskal-Wallis exams function an omnibus take a look at revealing whether any difference among teams is critical, we carried out pairwise comparisons and discovered that for every STD measure, the numerous-partners/some-safety cluster differed from both low-risk teams however not from the opposite high-risk group.
These traits may present further proof of a settling down effect-especially among men in the low-danger/low-protection group. This group included about one-fifth of the sample via age 21. In light of those findings, the following refinement of safer-sex messages may be obligatory for males with this threat pattern: Although they’ve performed pretty well in utilizing condoms, they should be inspired to do even better. The outcomes of this research suggest that safer-sex messages shouldn’t only embrace suggestions for consistent condom use, but in addition highlight the need for individuals to concentrate on how the number and sorts of their companions influence their STD danger. We spotlight three findings (not proven). Greater than half of younger men who participated in all three waves had always belonged to one of many three lower danger clusters (together with no-heterosexual-intercourse), and this group reported the lowest charges of cumulative and latest STDs in Wave 3 (Table 6). Nearly 5% of males who had all the time been in a lower risk group tested positive for chlamydia. Overall, almost 40% of men who entered a excessive-threat group in the first two waves had transitioned to a lower threat group by the third wave (not proven). Thirty-nine % of men collaborating in all three waves had been members of the various-partners/some-protection group, however not the opposite excessive-danger cluster, sooner or later between Waves 1 and 3; in 1995, some 32% of males on this cumulative danger group class reported ever having had an STD, 4% had had an STD throughout the past year and 3% tested optimistic for chlamydia.