Regression Analysis of Students’ Attitude on Relationship with Persons Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA)

Abstract

Statistics across the globe show that HIV/AIDS infections and its consequences have become widespread and difficult to deal with. Ghana though has had a decrease in infection of recent times, a more strategic approach need to be adopted in order to completely eradicate the pandemic. Stigmatization and discriminatory attitudes have been some of the reasons for the spread of the virus. In order to properly strategize against these attitudes there is the need to identify the variables that influence people to stigmatize and discriminate against PLWHA. This study therefore sought to find whether demographic independent variables such as gender, age, religious denomination, settlement type, marital status, and the belief in the reality of HIV have significant effects on stigmatization and discriminatory attitudes in terms of friendship, sex-mating, and marriage, as dependent variables. Quantitative methods were employed using stratified sampling technique. Questionnaire was utilized to solicit data. SPSS version 17 was used to analyze the data. Seven hypotheses were tested using Standard Logistic Binomial and Multiple Regression. The study showed that, gender (0.012), religious denomination (0.011), settlement-type (0.000), marital status (0.049) and belief that HIV is real (0.006), have significant effects on students’ attitude on, at least, one of the dependent variables. When dependent variables were combined, only the effects of belief that HIV is real (0.004), gender (0.025) and settlement-type (0.043) were significant. The study recommends that in fighting against stigmatization and discrimination, education campaigns and strategies should be holistic and multi-targeting in order to help eradicate the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Key words: friend, marriage, platonic, sex-mate, spouse