Original articleUnderstanding the role of perceived severity in STD-related care-seeking delays
Section snippets
Study design, sampling, and recruitment
Sampling of participants was conducted using purposive techniques. Participants included 21 adolescents who were participating in a longitudinal study regarding their perceived risk for STDs; they had been previously recruited into the larger study from either the Johns Hopkins Teen clinic or a free municipal STD clinic, both located in Baltimore, MD. Eligibility criteria for the larger cohort study included English-speaking residents of Baltimore, between 14 and 19 years of age, who had
Description of the sample
A summary of participant’s characteristics is presented in Table 1. Participants’ ages ranged from 14 to 19 years with a mean age of 17.7 years. The mean educational level was grade 10.7. Seventy-six percent of participants reported that their mothers had a high school education or higher. Lifetime number of sex partners ranged from 1 to 27 with a median of 5 partners. Fifty-two percent reported having had a prior history of an STD and 38% have at least one child.
Table 2 outlines participants’
Discussion
Data from the current study are consistent with previous findings that a substantial proportion of symptomatic females who attend clinics delay STD-related care seeking by more than one week [2], [11], [12]. However, of grave concern is the large proportion of participants who potentially would have further delayed or perhaps not ever been tested had it not been for their participation in the parent study despite the presence of STD-related symptoms. The significance of this matter is bolstered
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID grant #AI36986). The authors sincerely thank all of the female adolescents who participated in this study. We also thank Eva Moore for her participation in this project.
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