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Effect of a Family Intervention on Psychological Outcomes of Children Affected by Parental HIV

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Abstract

This study assesses intervention outcomes in children’s self-esteem, perceived parental care, and problem behavior and their potential connections to intervention outcomes in depressive symptoms and family functioning reported by parents living with HIV (PLH) and family members. A total of 79 families were recruited from Anhui province, China. The intervention was delivered at the individual, family and community levels. Face-to-face interviews were administered at baseline, 3 and 6 months. A mixed-effects regression model was used to assess the intervention effect on the improvement of children’s reported self-esteem, parental care, and problem behavior. To further investigate the association between the parental measures and their children’s outcomes, we added parental measure as a time-varying covariate to explore whether the intervention effect on children was influenced by the parental measures. We observed some intervention effects related to children’s psychological measures accompanied by the improvement in mental health of PLH and family members. Our study findings highlight the importance of empowering families as a whole to confront HIV related challenges and the need to develop child-adequate and age-specific intervention strategies.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by National Institute of Mental Health/NIH (Grant Number R01MH080606). We would like to thank our project team members in China for their contributions to this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Center for Community Health, University of California at Los Angeles, 10920 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 350, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, USA

    Li Li & Jie Wu

  2. Department of Medicine Statistics Core, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Li-Jung Liang

  3. Anhui Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Hefei, China

    Guoping Ji & Yongkang Xiao

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  1. Li Li
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  2. Li-Jung Liang
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  3. Guoping Ji
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  4. Jie Wu
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  5. Yongkang Xiao
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Correspondence to Li Li.

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Li, L., Liang, LJ., Ji, G. et al. Effect of a Family Intervention on Psychological Outcomes of Children Affected by Parental HIV. AIDS Behav 18, 2051–2058 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-014-0744-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-014-0744-9

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