Using Interactive Media in Health Practices

Interactive multimedia materials teaching safer sexual practices will be developed to motivate, educate, and prevent relapse in young heterosexual adults. Target group members will include sexually active, 18 to 29 year old women and men, with and without sexually transmitted diseases, either undergraduate or graduate students, as well as employed or unemployed persons in this age range. Subject recruitment will take place at a University health center and at a health club. A multidisciplinary team will adapt, extend, and commercialize educational products and computer and video-based learning technologies that we have developed and used in other studies. Program content will include information concerning risk factors for sexually transmitted diseases, strategies for pre-planning sexual encounters, the spectrum of safer sexual practices, new condom technologies, and techniques for negotiating safer sex encounters with partners. Principles of social learning theory and self-efficacy theory will be used to design the program elements; social marketing principles will be used to engage subjects and to assist them in maintaining safer sex behaviors. Qualitative and quantitative research techniques will be used in the creation, formative evaluation, and revision of teaching materials. A summative evaluation of program effectiveness will take place during the next phase of the project.