In Holding On anthropologist Alyson O’Daniel analyzes the abstract debates about health policy for the sickest and most vulnerable Americans as well as the services designated to help them by taking readers into the daily lives of poor African American women living with HIV at the advent of the 2006 Treatment Modernization Act. At a time when social support resources were in decline and publicly funded HIV/AIDS care programs were being re-prioritized, women’s daily struggles with chronic poverty, drug addiction, mental health, and neighborhood violence influenced women’s lives in sometimes unexpected ways. An ethnographic portrait of HIV-positive black women and their interaction with the U.S. healthcare system, Holding On reveals how gradients of poverty and social difference shape women’s health care outcomes and, by extension, women’s experience of health policy reform. Set among the realities of poverty, addiction, incarceration, and mental illness, the case studies in Holding On illustrate how subtle details of daily life affect health and how overlooking them when formulating public health policy has fostered social inequality anew and undermined health in a variety of ways.

The relationships between depression and HIV-related stigma, disclosure of HIV-positive status, and social support among African-American women with HIV disease living in the rural southeastern United States.

The purpose of this study was to examine African American women who are HIV positive, and their perception of everyday life as it relates to their overall quality of life. Within the social service community, there is a need to examine this particular population and learn to deal with not only the health crisis of having HIV, but also health problems that may interfere with their daily lives. Surveys are included.

I wrote this dissertation for the School of Advanced Studies at University of Phoenix, Arizona, in 2011. To do the research for the dissertation, I spent quite a bit of time at the Center of Disease Control and Prevention archives as a graduate student. I also interviewed medical doctors and others who knew about the subject matter. Since I wrote this dissertation, there has been more research published that I will continue to research and add to my archival collection. The issues of this dissertation were discussed as the emergent theoretical model and its components, which included implications of research, practice, stigma, burden, advocacy, and awareness. Leadership, education, and community resources were the dominant themes that emerged in the study. The study findings imply an increased need for leaders to present public awareness about the affects HIV/AIDS has on the African American community. Future research should consider the explicit nature of the answers, which benefited the study. The information would be helpful while improving the quality of life available for African American women and would enable leaders to interact with a leadership perspective (USAID, 2009).

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between stigma, levels of support and sources of strength for adult African American women living with HIV/AIDS in California. Research indicated higher levels of support and sources of strength correlate with lower levels of perceived stigma. The self-report survey was completed by 18 women using a descriptive and quantitative design. Although correlations were not significant at the .05 level, they were in the expected direction. The results indicated the higher levels of family support, friend support, and sources of strength, the lower levels of perceived stigma. Future research in this area could focus on aspects of diversity, including different cultural backgrounds within the African American community, and the impact HIV/AIDS has on the overall family. Implications for social work practice and policy include elevating awareness of effects perceived stigma has on mental health and wellbeing of those living with HIV/AIDS.