Bandura's social-cognitive theory as applied to an AIDS education training program
Abstract
There is a pressing need to disseminate AIDS information to women at-risk for AIDS. Health-care providers are in a position to do risk assessments of their patients, and to disseminate AIDS information to these patients. This study sought to answer the question: Can Bandura's social cognitive theory be used as a model to predict risk assessment, and AIDS information dissemination following an AIDS training program which used direct instruction as well as modeling and role play? The subjects were health-care providers from four metropolitan hospitals. The pretraining group consisted of 85 subjects, with 63 in the training condition, and 22 in the control group. The posttraining group consisted of 47 subjects, with 29 in the training group and 18 in the control group. The subjects were primarily female, and were from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. A ninety item questionnaire was administered before the training session, and three months after the training session. The questionnaire included attitude, knowledge, self-efficacy, risk assessment, and AIDS dissemination subscales. The scores from these scales were used in the path analysis. A path model was developed utilizing Bandura's theory, as applied to an AIDS training program. Self-efficacy was hypothesized as a mediating variable between training condition and risk assessment, and between knowledge and risk assessment. Risk assessment was a mediating variable between self-efficacy and dissemination of AIDS information. Attitude was a mediating variable between knowledge and risk assessment, and between knowledge and dissemination of AIDS information. LISREL VII was used to compute the path analysis. The pretraining and posttraining path analyses supported the hypothesized path model. It could be concluded that Bandura's theory can be used to develop a model which fits an AIDS training program. The results must be cautiously interpreted because of the limitations of the study. Only a small amount of variance was accounted for by the model. Other limitations of the study were related to the fact that this was a field study and many subjects failed to return the posttraining questionnaire. This study involved reported behavior and it would be desirable to know the extent to which risk assessments and dissemination of information was implemented.
Subject Area
Educational psychology|Psychology|Public health|Health education
Recommended Citation
Hanson, Judith Elena, "Bandura's social-cognitive theory as applied to an AIDS education training program" (1991). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI9136326.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI9136326
