Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS recognizes HIV as a socially structured disease - its transmission usually requires intimate contact between individuals - and shows how social networks shape high-risk behaviors and the spread of HIV. The authors recount the groundbreaking use of social network methods, ethnographic direct-observation techniques, and in-depth interviews in their study of a drug-using community in Brooklyn, New York. They provide a detailed documentary of the lives of community members. They describe drug-use, the affects of poverty and homelessness, the acquisition of money and drugs, and social relationships within the group. Social Networks, Drug Injectors' Lives, and HIV/AIDS shows that social networks and contexts are of crucial importance in understanding and fighting the AIDS epidemic. These findings should revitalize prevention efforts and reshape social policy.

Inhalt

1. Introduction. 2. `Learning from Lives'. 3. The Drug Scene and Risk Behaviors in Bushwick. 4. The Very First Hit; with K.A. Atwood. 5. Network Concepts and Serosurvey Methods. 6. The Research Participants and their Behaviors. 7. Personal Risk Networks and High-Risk Injecting Settings of Drug Injectors. 8. Syringe Sharing and the Social Characteristics of Drug-Injecting Dyads. 9. Sexual Networks, Condom Use, and the Prospects for HIV Spread to Non-Injection Drug Users. 10. Sociometric Networks among Bushwick Drug Injectors. 11. Networks and HIV and other Infections. 12. Prevention and Research. 13. Appendix: Methods for Assigning Linkages in Studies of Drug Injector Networks; with G. Ildefonso. References. Index.