Sexual partner concurrency of urban male and female STD clinic patients: a qualitative study.

Partner concurrency (i.e., overlapping sexual partnerships) facilitates the spread of STDs, including HIV. The present study explored the context of and motivations for partner concurrency among patients recruited from an urban STD clinic. Eight focus groups were conducted with 59 patients (47% women; 77% African American). Qualitative analyses revealed five motivational themes related to the occurrence of concurrent partnerships for men and women. Participants reported these partnerships tend to occur: when people believe that sexual partners are unfaithful or cannot be trusted; when sexual satisfaction is low; when patients report the need for different partners to fulfill multiple needs; in retaliation for a partner's concurrency; and when people wish to maintain a sexual relationship with an ex-partner who is the parent of a shared child. Four additional themes unique to men were identified. Men reported that they had multiple partners because this practice supports their sense of masculinity and is consistent with familial modeling and community norms, and because having multiple partners is "in a man's nature." Men also mentioned that the imbalance in the number of women-to-men in their sexual network facilitates partner concurrency. These findings can help prevention practitioners and researchers to develop interventions to reduce risk associated with partner concurrency.

Urban African-American men speak out on sexual partner concurrency: findings from a qualitative study.

Sexual partner concurrency, which fuels the spread of HIV, has been hypothesized as a cause of higher rates of HIV among low-income, urban African-Americans. Despite this hypothesis, little is known about the phenomenology of partner concurrency. To address this gap in the literature, we recruited 20 urban African-American men from a public STD clinic to elicit their ideas about partner concurrency. Five themes emerged during focus group discussions. First, there was a general consensus that it is normative to have more than one sexual partner. Second, men agreed it is acceptable for men to have concurrent partners, but disagreed about whether it is acceptable for women. Third, although men provided many reasons for concurrent partnerships, the most common reasons were that (a) multiple partners fulfill different needs, and (b) it is in a man's nature to have multiple partners. Fourth, men described some (but not all) of the negative consequences of having concurrent partners. Finally, men articulated spoken and unspoken rules that govern concurrent partnerships. These findings increase knowledge about urban, African-American men's attitudes toward concurrent partnerships, and can help to improve the efficacy of sexual risk-reduction interventions for this group of underserved men and their partners.

African American men's perceptions of power in intimate relationships.

Power in intimate relationships is an important predictor of sexual risk behavior. The purpose of this study was to better understand African American men's perceptions of interpersonal power. A total of 20 African American men participated in focus groups to elicit their perceptions of power in intimate relationships; their responses were analyzed using grounded theory. From this analysis, a conceptual framework was developed that, among African American men, power in relationships was largely determined by the contribution of financial resources, and/or withholding sex. These findings were then considered in light of existing social-psychological theories of power in relationships. Future research should consider how to incorporate this understanding of interpersonal power into current theories of sexual risk behavior in order to develop more effective HIV risk reduction programs.