COMMUNITY FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEWS (FGIs), 2013, 2018:
2013: We conducted nine FGIs to enable us to contextualize respondents’ lives by providing information on the normative environment, structures and institutions in which individuals live and make decisions about their health as they age in an HIV endemic setting. FGIs were stratified by age group (40s, 50s, 60+ [pension eligible]) and gender (men, women, mixed gender). Each focus group had 5-12 participants, amounting to a total of 77 respondents from 7 villages. Respondents were recruited from places within Agincourt where locals regularly gather such as market places, taxi ranks, and home verandas.These settings are ones that older adults in the community are likely to frequent, and where everyday discussions and norms are exchanged, and are thus ideal places to explore the normative environment and to extract information about how the social context influences risk and protection for older adults. The FGIs lasted 2-3 hours, and were audio-recorded, translated and transcribed from Shangaan to English by the local research team.
The FGI instrument – which included questions and hypothetical vignettes featuring similarly-aged older men and women – focused on community norms and discourses around sexual behavior and aging, barriers and incentives around HIV testing, ART uptake and adherence, discourses and dominant expectations around the key social roles and life events unique to adults at different points in the transition to old age, and the collective community experience of pre and post-apartheid change within the community and South Africa more broadly.
2018: We conducted ten FGIS to follow up on the 2013 FGIS. They included 84 people and were stratified by gender (women/men/mixed gender), age group (40s, 50s and 60s-plus) and proximity to a health facility (6 FGIs in villages with a health facility and 4 FGIs in contiguous villages without a health facility). FGI participants were asked about community norms and discourses about HIV and ART, barriers and incentives to HIV testing and ART uptake, and community experiences of HIV/AIDS and ART in the last 5 years (since mass ART roll-out) and 15 years (since peak AIDS-related mortality). Participants were also presented with a series of vignettes featuring hypothetical people in their age group who: (i) might have HIV; (ii) were living with HIV and navigating the ART landscape; and (iii) found out they have high blood pressure (hypertension) or diabetes. Questions invited FGI participants to reflect on the motivations and experiences of these hypothetical individuals as they navigated healthcare.
For more information, see:
Angotti, Nicole, Sanyu A. Mojola, Enid Schatz, Jill R. Williams, and F. Xavier Gómez-Olivé. 2018. “‘Taking Care’ in the Age of AIDS: Older Rural South Africans’ Strategies for Surviving the HIV Epidemic.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 20(3):262–75.https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2017.1340670
Schatz, Enid, David Ifeolu, Nicole Angotti, F. Xavier Gomez-Olive, and Sanyu A. Mojola. 2021. From “secret” to “sensitive issue”: Shifting ideas about HIV disclosure among older rural South Africans in the era of antiretroviral treatment. Journal of Aging and Health.
https://doi.org/10.1177/08982643211020202)