ADAPT-POL New Orleans: Adaptation of Prevention Techniques With Popular Opinion Leader

Adopting and Demonstrating the Adaptation of Prevention Techniques (ADAPT) is a supplement to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Community Based Organization Program Announcement 04064 (PA 04064). The purpose of ADAPT is to improve the understanding of the processes needed for adapting evidence-based behavioral interventions to fit new conditions or populations and to pilot the CDC-developed adaptation guidance. The ADAPT project responds to concerns from the field that existing interventions do not address the HIV prevention needs of their specific population. This project seeks to develop guidance for agencies to engage in the evidence-based adaptation of interventions previously shown to be effective in evaluation settings for use in real world applications.

The New Orleans AIDS Task Force (NO/AIDS) is one of five grantees funded to use the adaptation guidance to adapt an intervention packaged by the CDC's Replicating Effective Programs and disseminated by CDC's Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions. The agency will adapt Jeff Kelly's Popular Opinion Leader (POL) intervention (Kelly, 2004; Kelly et al., 1991) for use in Internet venues with seropositive men who identify ethnically/racially as other than White/Caucasian who have sex with other men (men who have sex with men [MSM] of color).

Kelly's POL intervention is a community-level, evidence-based HIV prevention intervention that originally targeted gay and bisexual men in smaller cities throughout the United States. Kelly's intervention seeks to identify and enlist the support of well-known and well-liked opinion leaders to take on risk reduction advocacy roles. Opinion leaders attend sessions to learn how to engage in risk reduction conversations with people in their own social networks. The opinion leaders help to reshape social norms to encourage safer sex by helping to create a social environment in which MSM feel comfortable and empowered to make decisions to avoid high-risk sexual behaviors.